Keeping the Balance
by rainingaces
Summary: Sequel to LEFT OVER. No one recognized the name when Kurt first spoke it–a name he'd found in his dreams–but he couldn't shake the feeling it was important: "Blaine". He had to find out what had happened to Blaine.
1. Thy Dreams Shall Be Prophets

_**Title: **Keeping the Balance_  
><strong>Author: <strong>sun_and_rain  
><strong>Rating:<strong> PG-13  
><strong>Warning: <strong>deals with issues of consent, homophobia, and memory loss  
><strong>Summary:<strong> _They met up once a week, to gather stories and fragments of memories like puzzle pieces. No one recognized the name when Kurt first spoke it–a name he'd found buried somewhere in his dreams–but he couldn't shake the feeling that it was important: "Blaine". Whatever had been taken from them had something to do with Blaine._

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><p><strong>AN:** Hello all, and welcome to the sequel to _Left Over!_You probably need to read that one in order to understand this one, but, if you want to try an experiment and check this out anyway, and then read everything backwards, I certainly won't judge you. Everyone has their own reading habits. ;) For those of you who read Left Over and have a few questions, I've been answering headcannon asks at my tumblr [ **sunandrainfic . tumblr . com / tagged / left-over-headcannon** ] if you want to check them out (or ask some of your own).

Anyway, without further ado, for there is much too much to be had: the sequel. Enjoy! Comments are always welcome.

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><p><strong>Chapter One: <strong>Thy Dreams Shall Be Prophets

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><p><em>"Don't."<em>

_"I know it."_

_"Don't. You're only going to get frustrated. Come on, we've only got a few more moments together."_

_"I **know **it."_

_The boy looked at him, carved sad and longing. Kurt squeezed his eyes shut briefly._

_"You're not going to remember, Kurt," he heard the boy say softly. "You never remember."_

_"I'll remember this time." His eyes opened so he could stare at the boy stubbornly. "You know my name. I know I know yours. You've told me it before. Isn't that progress, that I know you've told it to me before?"_

_The boy was staring at him like he wanted nothing more in the world but to reach out and hold him. Kurt could feel it in the air. He had never been looked at the way this boy looked at him. _

_No. He had. He had to have—he glanced down at the words stitched into his skin. Someone had loved him, once._

_This boy. This boy was the key to finding out who had..._

"…urt…"

_The boy's eyes closed briefly in what looked like resignation._

_Kurt's eyes widened suddenly and he straightened triumphantly. "It starts with a—!"_

"KURT! Come on, it's not break anymore, you've gotta get up! We'll be late!"

"I'm up! I'm up!" he cried loudly, suddenly, jumping out of the bed before he even realized he was fully awake. Right. Right! School!

Kurt glanced at the clock as his heart beat out the rhythm of a Gershwin musical, trying to hold onto the nearly-invisible vestiges of his dream slipping through his fingers while he dressed._ Hair. Dark hair. Orange… Brown eyes? Green. No, blue—_

A name, flashing bright and brief for seconds and then—gone. It started with…

Kurt blew out a breath in frustration. It was gone again. _He _was gone again. He had almost remembered this time, too, he was sure of it. (_Kurt_, someone whispered)

At least he had a voice. He could recognize and remember a voice. And dark hair—he was positive it was dark hair. He made his way down the stairwell, swimming in his thoughts.

"What's up with you, dude?" Finn asked as he tossed Kurt the keys. Kurt almost missed catching them (he didn't). "You've been oversleeping like crazy lately. Are you sick or something?"

"I'm fine," Kurt said, looking for it—and _there_, as soon as he stepped off the final step, Finn's eyes flickered past him as if expecting something to be behind him. Just like yesterday. Kurt glanced back up the stairs, knowing nothing was there. "What are you looking at?" he asked, keeping his tone firmly curious and his expression blank.

Finn blinked. "Nothing," he said, looking at Kurt like he was speaking Chinese. "…Seriously, is there something wrong? Because my mom can help if you're feeling sick."

Kurt shook his head, widening his eyes in what he hoped looked like innocence. "I'm fine," he repeated. He added a smile for good measure.

Finn looked at him suspiciously. "Okay," he said slowly. Shouldering his backpack, he headed out the door. "Come on. We're gonna be late."

Kurt narrowed his eyes as he watched his step-brother leave the house.

Okay. Be more careful around Finn. _Got it._

Kurt pulled on his coat and followed belatedly to the car, starting the engine and heading to the school.

Twelve hours.

He saw him in his dreams every night; a ghostly after-image of trailing amber lights, silky smooth voices, and the feeling of being embraced. They were like breaths of fresh air, the only times his mind felt completely and utterly clear. The more he dreamt, the more they met, the more he remembered their meetings when he awoke. He clung to them like life-rafts, inflatable facts he held to tightly as he fought against the tide to remember each moment—to try to discover what he had lost.

_Lucid dreaming_, is what the internet claimed he was doing. He didn't know if it was real or if it was in his head, but something inside of him knew that whatever they were, the dreams were important. He had taken to sleeping half the day away during winter break, fighting for the morning he would wake up and remember what he looked like—what he sounded like—how he felt.

Who he was.

One day he was going to wake up with a name held tightly in his fists, and he wasn't going to let go until he had memorized every curve of every letter, branding it into his mind to deeply he would never be rid of the scar of it.

Kurt glanced down at the looping edge of a 'y' sewn blue into his veins, tracing the word it formed with his finger. (_I love you_). An idea feathered lightly over his brain; he wasn't sure if he was remembering something or making it up in his head, but…

_Warm hands caressed up his back, back and forth, soothing…_

The metallic slam of a locker jolted him from his thoughts, and he tugged his sleeve down, looking up to find Mercedes leaning against his locker with a critical expression on her face.

"Did Puck give you pot?" She asked bluntly.

Kurt gaped. "I… _what?_"

"You've been acting high all day. And I bet you've been sharing it with Rachel. _What_ is so fascinating about your arm?"

"Nothing," he breathed, feeling his sleeve again to make sure the words were covered. "What—and I haven't been acting _high_, Mercedes, _please_," he added scornfully. "You think I'd ruin my voice like that?"

"Don't stiff it 'til you've sniffed it," came Puck's opinion, gone as soon as he appeared.

Kurt blinked.

"That happened, right? That wasn't just me?" he asked Mercedes, looking around the hallway warily. She nodded. "Okay. Just making sure." He picked up his bag and started to walk to lunch, Mercedes following after him. "Wait, what did you mean about Rachel? Is she okay?"

"She's out sick today," Mercedes informed him, and Kurt turned to look at her in surprise.

"Rachel Berry, out _sick_ from school? When's the last time that happened?"

"Sixth grade. She had the measles and her dads made her stay home until she wasn't contagious anymore." Kurt didn't know why he was surprised she knew that.

"Was she all right over break?" He remembered the Tuesday before school let out for the winter, and Rachel's unknowing tears at Tina's song.

They had reached the cafeteria, and Mercedes turned to him seriously. "No one's heard from Rachel since school started," she said quietly. "What is going on with you two?"

Kurt shook his head. "Whatever is bothering her doesn't have anything to do with me, 'Cedes, I haven't talked to her."

"She won't even answer _Finn_'s texts. There's something wrong." Kurt was briefly hurt that Finn hadn't told him anything about this. Then he remembered he hadn't talked to Finn at _all _over break, least of all about Rachel, and the hurt gave way to confusion. What had he been doing all break? Sleeping?

Had he even talked to Mercedes or Tina?

"You keep turning up to school looking like you're only half here," Mercedes poked him. Kurt made a face, attention once more on her. "Plus, you've been oversleeping, and I've never seen you so lazily-dressed as you are now. Why are both you and Rachel acting all weird if you don't have anything to do with each other?"

"Where did you hear I've been oversleeping?" Kurt asked, affronted, sparing a small glance down at his clothes (they weren't _that _bad). He followed the motions of picking up a tray, piling something that looked at least a little healthy onto his plate.

Mercedes gave him a look. "Finn told Puck, who told Mike—"

"Who told Tina," Kurt finished with her, slumping resigned into a seat at an empty table.

"You can't tell me it's nothing, Kurt. It's got to be something."

He pushed out his lower jaw, blowing out a breath as he glanced around the cafeteria. Dave Karofsky snagged his gaze with a stare of his own before quickly looking away.

There was something up with that, Kurt noted quietly.

"I'm just sick, 'Cedes," he finally said, toying with the too-soggy carrots on his plate. "Maybe I'm coming down with what Rachel has."

He mashed the orange circles together with his fork until they dissolved into a deformed mountain, pretending to miss the hurt expression flickering across Mercedes' face.

She didn't know someone had been taken from him. She wouldn't understand.

Absently, he began shoveling the soupy peas resting on another section of his tray into the mouth of his newly-formed volcano.

How many more hours of school? Four? And then he had homework and dinner.

At least six hours until he could sleep again. Probably more like eight, if he was being realistic.

Eight hours until dark hair, bright (green?) eyes, and soft voice. One more chance to remember his name.

The words on his skin itched as he thought about it.

_"I should stop doing this. This isn't supposed to be an escape, not for either of us."_

_Kurt studied him intently. Hazel eyes, not green. Beautiful hazel eyes—how could he have forgotten that?_

_"Kurt."_

_"Why not?" Kurt finally spoke. "This is the only place I get to see you. I've lost you."_

_The boy's gaze sharpened abruptly before he just as quickly dulled. "You don't even remember who I am," he said quietly, a wry smile tickling his lips._

_Kurt leaned forward. "You love me," he said confidently. _

_The boy met his eyes in hazel-painted surprise. _

_"You're the one who wrote the words, aren't you?" Kurt continued. "You wrote them in my veins, on my skin. I know it."_

_"Can you read them?" the boy breathed._

_Kurt nodded. "'I love you'," he quoted. "All over me. 'I love you, I love you, I love you'."_

_The boy reached out, eyes swimming and face shattering, but Kurt tensed as he got too near._

_His hand dropped._

_"You don't remember," he said. His expression shuttered closed and dark colors carved out his silhouette._

_ "I remember you have dark hair," Kurt offered apologetically. "When I wake up. I remember your voice. I remember more than I did before."_

_"I keep trying to tell you, over and over, but you forget it all when you wake up. It's like you're only half here. I don't know what to do."_

_"Tell me again."_

_"You won't remember."_

_"Tell me anyway."_

_He stood still, painting Kurt with his eyes; soft strokes, tender brushes, warm sweeps. The colors bled into his irises._

_"Please don't make me," he said softly._

_Kurt swallowed. _

_"All right," he whispered._

_He couldn't look away, afraid he might forget the image of the boy in front of him as soon as he turned his head._

_"I'll remember this time," he ventured hesitantly. "This time I will."_

_The boy breathed in._

_Out._

_"…This time," he repeated._

_And for the millionth first time, again… Kurt knew his name._


	2. One of Life's Best Coping Mechanisms

_**Title: **Keeping the Balance_  
><strong>Author: <strong>sun_and_rain  
><strong>Rating:<strong> PG-13  
><strong>Warning: <strong>deals with issues of consent, homophobia, and memory loss  
><strong>Summary:<strong> _They met up once a week, to gather stories and fragments of memories like puzzle pieces. No one recognized the name when Kurt first spoke it–a name he'd found buried somewhere in his dreams–but he couldn't shake the feeling that it was important: "Blaine". Whatever had been taken from them had something to do with Blaine._

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><p><strong>AN:** Gasp! A _Blaine POV_in a Left Over chapter? Yes. He tugged my sleeve and told me he wanted to talk, so I let him. Huzzah! We'll be alternating between him and Kurt for a lot of the fic, just as a warning. Hope you enjoy!

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><p><strong>Chapter Two: The Difference Between An Inconvenience and A Problem<strong>

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><p>He told himself to stop pacing, but he knew his feet wouldn't stop moving even if he wanted them to. With seventy square feet of empty room to traverse at his leisure there wasn't much else to do. He could pretend that the pacing was using up energy he would prefer to be applying toward much more useful pursuits (such as traveling in his dreams, or punching Andrew in the face, or murdering Wes Montgomery in a slow and painful manner), but the growing heat of his skin would beg otherwise. Jesus, he felt like he was in a volcano.<p>

He breathed in through his nose, cricked his neck, shook out his arms. Pacing, pacing, pacing. Not for the first time, his eyes darted over to the dried plants and herbs hanging in the mockingly open entryway.

_I have many skills, but opening locked doors is not one of them_, he remembered saying to Flint once (or something like that). How kind of Erickson to ensure that his proficiency with picking locks was no longer an issue, with his doorway that was conspicuously _missing _an actual door. Freedom gaped long and narrow out from it, down a dusky hallway that he could _see every inch of_.

He saw when they came. He saw when they left. He saw the window at the very end of the hallway, open and unlocked and staring back at him whenever he deemed to glance at it.

He wanted a fucking door.

Breathing out heavily, he picked up the pace. What he wouldn't give for some water. His head tilted back on a forward step, and his eyes closed and he pretended he was somewhere else.

A glimpse of Kurt: the image gauzy in streaming daylight, sitting in class. He was drawing in a language he didn't recognize as a language, sketching symbols he thought were only doodles during a teacher's boring lecture. He wanted to reach out, cry out, tell him what the symbols meant _(find me, please, I love you, you're dying)—_

His head snapped up and he lost his balance, veering sideway to bang into the wall and he stilled, for seconds, minutes. It was too hot to move.

_Stop using it, _he told himself, even though he knew he wouldn't. He paced again, wearing out the floor, the soles of his feet. He could still feel them all up here, he could feel them _so loudly_ up here, and he didn't know if it was because Andrew had told him he could or because there were so many of them that he couldn't ignore it, but they overfilled him and it sparked from his fingers. He remembered learning about the human body, back when he was allowed to learn things like a normal child; that it was made up of 70% water and yet a human could drown by drinking too much.

He moved faster, feeling faint and a little nauseous as the mass of downstairs emotion fogged his brain and welled up inside of him, and wondered if the same applied to magic.

Erickson clearly didn't think so.

_Stop thinking about it._

He stumbled into the corner of the room and almost let himself sink down to the ground. He blinked hard and pushed against the wall to get him moving again. He was still too warm. He needed to keep moving, burn it off.

He licked his lips unconsciously and glanced out the open doorway. There was a bed and a heavy comforter in the corner of the room—a discarded sweater, socks, a long-sleeve shirt—he had stripped down to his undershirt and kept the jeans (_Kurt's jeans_), stopped using the bed (he didn't remember in how long, it was so hard to tell the passage of time here). He was still hot. Andrew was going to come up soon, water and food and daggers of unwanted emotions coming up with him.

The water would help, but maybe he should try not eating. Hurt himself. Something to use up all the heat building inside of him, let him feel normal again (_hide the fork that comes with his food and scratch his skin, let the heat bleed out)_.

He tripped, catching himself on the stone floor.

His legs didn't work as well as they had when he had begun the pacing, and he knew that wasn't a good sign, but he didn't know what to do about it. One day, he was going to wake up and not be able to move them at all anymore.

He breathed slowly, staring down at the floor and staying on his hands and knees.

He closed his eyes and thought of Kurt. Pastel watercolors of Kurt in the choir room bloomed inside his eyelids. Kurt, singing in front the glee club and beautiful, angelic, stubborn. He walked out of the room without wanting to, following a hallway, and then Rachel was walking past him and they were in his middle school, and she passed him and they locked eyes, briefly, and abruptly everything was _painful_, his heart hurt, so much he couldn't keep walking and he knew, he knew, he _knew_ he had to stop her before—

She cut off, all of it _cut off,_ and he jolted as his eyes snapped open with a gasp and all of his muscles _tensed _on the ground as panic shuddered through him. Wait, what, _wait_, had that been downstairs, had someone—? He shoved his head into the crook of his elbow, focusing on the mass of confusion downstairs, listening, opening, feeling…

Something gripped his heart-a stranger's thrill of doing something he knew he shouldn't. It was a different taste than Andrew's feelings, slightly less bitter on the tongue. And it was coming closer.

_Oh, **he's** new._

He collapsed sideways onto the floor, the stone not-quite-cold against his skin. He stared as the source of the foreign emotions entered the room, a new kid he'd never seen before, ducking under the dried, cracking herbs to cross over the threshold of the door. The slow burn of attraction hit his stomach, vague enough that it was easy to tell it came from the kid and not him. He watched the new kid crouch down in front of him.

"Do me a favor?" he asked, his voice sounding over-loud in the stillness of the room.

The kid smirked a little. "Whatever you want," he said.

"Check to make sure no one just tried to kill themselves. Then come back and tell me."

The smirk dropped, and the owner of it stared at him seriously. "I'm not supposed to be up here," he said.

"I gathered." Amusement and pride swelled in his chest (_not his_). "What's your name?"

"Sebastian."

He looked out the doorway, spotting the window at the end of the corridor.

"Do you have a favorite bird, Sebastian?" he asked, the blue-grey glimmer of sky staring back at him.

"Sure," Sebastian answered easily. "I've always been a fan of warblers."

A smile twitched his lips and he turned back to look at Sebastian. "You shouldn't be up here," he said lowly, fighting a grin.

Sebastian had no such qualms. "Yeah, well. I rarely do what I'm told," he showed his teeth.

Possibility and hope and a nervous delight sent a tremble through his limbs.

"Hanging on the floor?" Sebastian settled down fully from his crouched position, sitting calmly on the ground. "You're not cold?"

"No. I like it better on the floor than on the bed."

"That so?" Arousal shot straight through to his groin, strong enough that it took him a few seconds to recognize it had come from Sebastian.

His skin started burning. He had been still for too long. He had to start moving again.

Or maybe.

His eyes sketched out Sebastian's outline, coming to rest back at green eyes that seemed to know what he was thinking.

"Do me one more favor?"

Sebastian's eyes glittered and a powerful wave of anticipation hit him. He took it in quietly, filing away the tremor of wariness at the pit of his stomach.

"Go ahead," Sebastian said, a slight breathlessness taming some of the cockiness in his voice.

His fingers flexed, and he moved his right hand forward: open and beckoning.

Sebastian licked his lips and took a breath. Hunger.

The fingers slid almost sensually down his palm, lacing together with his own as they held hands.

"Think of something good," he said, still locked in Sebastian's eyes.

Sebastian breathed in and—

It _rushed _through him, out of him, up his arm and through his hand and _out, out, finally, out!_ His head snapped back and he couldn't stop his body from arching toward Sebastian, a gasp escaping him as liquid_ painpleasure_ tugged through his body and the relief of letting it go, having it _leave, be released _overpowered the sharp, nauseous defiance of his body rebelling against the intruding presence that gripped his heart and _wrenched _the heat out of him_._

It hurt as much as it stimulated every nerve in his body and he didn't know (he never knew) if he was going to scream in pain or moan in ecstasy as he opened his mouth to try to breathe through it.

It was over too soon (_not soon enough_) and his eyelids fluttered as he snatched his hand back and away from Sebastian's.

As soon as he let go, the nausea won over. He flopped onto his back to try to stop himself from throwing up, feeling heavy and immovable. He hated it.

But the floor was cold.

He was cold.

Again.

_Finally._

"Thank you," he said softly, closing his eyes in relief.

"Any time," Sebastian replied. He let shivers run up his body as he heard Sebastian get up. "Do you want the blanket?" Sebastian's voice drifted over him.

"No," he replied calmly. If he stayed cold, he could see Kurt again tonight. He wouldn't have to worry about drowning. "Tell me about the suicide," he said as he felt Sebastian settle something down next to him.

"No suicide," Sebastian said. "I don't know why you thought there was."

"Felt it," he murmured, fighting the sleep that weighted him down. "I thought it was Rachel, at first, but it didn't feel like her. It felt like middle school." He felt as Sebastian started to leave, the herbs rustling as he passed under them. "I'm probably going crazy," he whispered.

"I wouldn't be surprised," Sebastian answered back, and he was beyond the door now, he could feel it. "They're pulling some crazy shit with you, killer."

He cracked an eye open and sent Sebastian a smirk. "Yes," he agreed. "That's a way to put it."

Sebastian's gaze was less possessive than Andrew's. Not by much—but Sebastian was the first person he'd seen besides Andrew in weeks. He'd take what he could get.

Swallowing, he risked it: "Any time?"

Sebastian's grin was fox-like.

"Any time," he confirmed.

He watched as the boy left, down the hallway, up to the window, and turning the corner into normality. Gone.

Warily, he looked down at the object Sebastian had left with him.

Roses. Pure, white roses.

"Ha," he breathed softly, picking them up. White for funerals. "Fitting," he murmured, a thrill of morbid humor plucking his heart. "Score one for you."

Maybe he didn't have to keep pacing after all.

Plans formulated like ice crystals in his mind, solidifying too slowly for him to be sure of anything yet. (_But it was something._) He hummed, shivering in the cold.

Relaxing into the floor, he closed his eyes and thought of Kurt.


	3. A Grand Memory For Forgetting

_**Title: **Keeping the Balance_  
><strong>Author: <strong>sun_and_rain  
><strong>Rating:<strong> PG-13  
><strong>Warning: <strong>deals with issues of consent, homophobia, and memory loss  
><strong>Summary:<strong> _They met up once a week, to gather stories and fragments of memories like puzzle pieces. No one recognized the name when Kurt first spoke it–a name he'd found buried somewhere in his dreams–but he couldn't shake the feeling that it was important: "Blaine". Whatever had been taken from them had something to do with Blaine._

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><p><strong>AN:** And we're back to Kurt! Enjoy! Any constructive criticism is more than welcome! Please review if you like the chapter, dears!

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><p><strong>Chapter Three: A Grand Memory For Forgetting<br>**

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><p><em>"I know you."<em>

_The boy searched him with careful, hopeful eyes. "Yes," he said softly. _

_Kurt smiled and reached, locking their fingers together. The boy stared down at their intertwined hands, a look passing over his face Kurt couldn't describe as anything but childlike bewilderment—almost as if he had never held hands with someone in his life. His lips echoed Kurt's smile. "What do you know?" he asked. _

_"I know your name," Kurt said. The boy's head snapped up. "I remembered it when I woke up this morning."_

_The smile grew on his face, and Kurt hesitated to remove it._

_"I… don't remember it now," he finally admitted, shame coloring his voice. "I forgot it by the time I found a pen. But I had it, briefly, I had it. It starts with a B."_

_B swallowed and glanced once more down at their entangled hands._

_"What—else do you know?" he said haltingly._

_"Your eyes are hazel," Kurt offered, wincing a little. It sounded pathetic when he said it like that, but it had seemed like such an achievement when he was conscious. "I remember that when I'm awake."_

_B only smiled sadly, in a resigned, bleak way. He tugged away his hand and, in the same move, tugged panic from Kurt's chest. _

_"Don't give up on me," he blurted, a sudden fear gripping him at the look in B's eyes. "Please, I'll remember—don't give up on me!"_

_B shook his head, the smile still small and heartbreaking on his lips. _

_"Never," he said simply._

_But his eyes stayed sad as he began to tell Kurt—again—for who knew how many times—what he couldn't remember. There was something so tired and remote about his expression. He looked like he had lived for ages._

_Kurt's fingers tingled with missing warmth._

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><p>He wanted to scream.<p>

Frustration built up inside of him at the appearance of every empty space he found in his brain, damming up his arteries like poison. He felt like he was slipping backwards. Previously, he would wake up and remember a feature or a tone of voice and keep it for the rest of the day. But recently, he'd get brief flashes of the whole of his memories, three precious minutes of knowing _everything _he'd lost and then forgetting it all—and it was _all_ of it that he'd forget, losing precious pieces of knowledge he had clung to for days, had known as facts for much longer than three minutes, all in a flash of white. He felt like he had been dropped in the middle of a desert without a map. There was an oasis somewhere, he knew; but no matter how hard he searched, it slipped through his grasping fingers tauntingly. And whenever he began to convince himself it was all a fantasy, the image of it appeared to him in his dreams—and he'd wake, remembering almost nothing of the night before but having ignited a yearning so powerful it still left him breathless to think of it. His head had begun to ache, quietly, as if in response to the clogging frustration pressing upon him, and Kurt knew it was only a matter of time before he broke down and kicked over a chair.

He had had a name. He had _known _it, it had _been _there, on the edge of his lips, ready on the tip of his pen for seconds until he drew the beginning line and suddenly he'd blanked and, surprise, had also lost the color of his eyes.

Green.

_No, _he _knew _it wasn't green, because he had thought it was green before and he had been wrong—and he remembered being wrong, remembered thinking _how could I have ever thought his eyes were green, _but for the life of him he couldn't remember _the color of his eyes._

_God but he wanted to **scream**!_

He stalked into the choir room, hoping against hope that every time he closed his eyelids he'd suddenly see them, round and expressive and—

Had they been blue?

He blinked and noticed Mercedes, who was looking at him in concern.

"Why did you miss school yesterday?" she asked as he sat down next to her in the choir room. "Are you okay?"

"I told you, I'm sick," he said perhaps a little snappishly, looking around the choir room for—what, he didn't know. His gaze landed on the piano and a smile involuntarily twitched his lips. _Maybe they were brown_. "Did I miss anything crazy in glee club?"

"Just a lecture about attendance and everyone talking about Rachel."

"Why? Did something happen?" Kurt asked immediately. He hadn't been keeping tabs on Rachel the way he'd planned to, too focused on wracking his brain for clues to riddles he could only half-remember.

"She let Quinn into her house yesterday, and no one knows what they talked about. Quinn won't tell anybody." Mercedes continued, not bothering to keep her voice down, and Kurt glanced over at Quinn to find her glaring at them. He raised his chin defiantly as he matched her gaze.

"So you all gave her the third degree?" he asked. Quinn finally looked away, rolling her eyes.

"No dice, Hummel, she won't talk," Puck intruded on their conversation, something almost territorial in his voice. "You won't get anything out of her."

"I wasn't planning to interrogate," Kurt snapped. Mercedes frowned, but anything she might have been about to say was interrupted as Mr. Schue entered the room, carrying stacks of music.

"Okay guys, we're trying something new today!" he announced, passing out the sheet music as he talked. Kurt turned to the front and settled back into his chair

"Michael Jackson?" Mike asked, looking through the music. "And the Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs…"

"I was talking to Coach Bieste earlier, and we both want to try to tame some of the animosity between you guys and the rest of the football team." Kurt's breath caught as he thought of Karofsky, a phantom paranoia twisting his gut. "I know a lot of you are playing next week, but Shannon and I thought this would be a great opportunity for all of you to bond. Like I said, we're doing something new: you guys will be performing this song with the football team at half-time."

Kurt thought he might have heard a few cheers, but his ears were ringing and he'd suddenly felt like he'd been submerged in ice.

"Mr. Schue, the football team _hates _us," Tina protested over the celebrating of Finn, Artie, and Mike. "Why would they want to perform with us? They're constantly letting us know they think we're losers."

"That's why, starting tomorrow, we're going to have the football team join us for rehearsal," Schue stated. There were several protests at that. "Maybe if the team opens up a bit and realizes how much fun they can have, they'll treat you all a little nicer afterward," Schue spoke over the angry voices of the glee club, raising his hands in surrender. "I know it might be hard, but try, guys!"

Santana made a comment in the back that Kurt couldn't hear. "I'm going to ignore that," Schue said pointedly. "Artie, can you, Tina, and Santana split up the verses? Everyone else gather around the piano and Brad will go over your parts." The club groaned as the trudged over, and Kurt watched them, unable to move.

"Kurt," Schue said quietly. Kurt jumped and looked up to see Mr. Schue standing next to him. "Can I talk to you for a minute?"

Kurt stood up, too stunned to do much else.

Mercedes sent him a worried glance before making her way over to the piano.

Schue looked at him carefully.

"I know you were having some trouble with Karofsky earlier this year," he began, leading them to a quiet corner of the room. "To be honest, that's one of the reasons Coach Bieste brought up this whole idea. But if you're not comfortable doing this: tell me now, Kurt, and you'll be excused from participating."

Kurt studied him with wide eyes, all the times Karofsky had slammed him into lockers swimming in front of him. A rising fear slid up his throat as he thought of the kiss in the locker room; the staring in the cafeteria; the unnerving feeling of spiders running up his arms as—

No, wait, that hadn't…

Kurt blinked, and a sweater suddenly came to mind, one with big, wide buttons that—

"Kurt?" Schue prodded.

Kurt blinked rapidly, shaking his head, and tried to remember the question. Right. Karofsky.

But Karofsky hadn't been giving him too much trouble recently. Not really. Kurt had caught him looking at him too many times to count, but every time Kurt caught his eye, Karofsky immediately looked away. Almost like he didn't want Kurt to know he was looking. And he always looked—disappointed. As if he had been expecting to see something else. Or… something.

Kurt felt a burning curiosity swell inside of him as he wondered what, exactly, Karofsky had been expecting to see. (_Or who,_ a hopeful voice whispered at the back of his mind.)

Swallowing, Kurt made a decision.

"No," he said slowly, sounding out every minute change of vowel. "No, I think I'll be okay."

Schue looked at him with a glint of pride in his eyes (Kurt felt a brief flare of resentment as he wondered what Schue's face would have looked like had Kurt said he'd wanted out). "Okay," he said, smiling and handing Kurt the music. "But let me know if you change your mind."

"I will," Kurt assured him. There was no way he'd spend more time with Karofsky than he absolutely had to. And if things started to get threatening again? Kurt would be out the door before Karofsky could come up with a name for his other fist.

"You can go join everyone else, now," Schue placed a hand on Kurt's shoulder, pushing him off toward the group clustered around the piano.

Mike and Puck were fooling around with some of the erasers as Brad tried to plunk out their chords, fighting mock battles with the markers left in the tray of the whiteboard. A grin tugged at him as he moved towards the piano, and—

Suddenly, briefly, his vision blinded white.

Brad wasn't sitting at the piano.

Someone else was there. Someone with dark hair, and a soft expression; with plump lips; with—

_Hazel eyes._

Kurt heard the gasp leaving his lips, but he didn't feel himself make it.

Hazel eyes. Then amber, an eternal, endless hallway of amber in one warm, loving gaze. But also hazel. He…

His stomach cartwheeled, eyes widening as he looked at the boy in front of him, sitting on the piano, playing… he knew that song! He was playing…

The image faded and the rest of the glee club took its place, but Kurt suddenly couldn't stand still. He had to get home—he had to sleep, the minute he got home, he—had to _write this down!_

Kurt scrambled across the room and tore open his messenger bag, searching wildly for a pen. A pen, a pen, he needed to get this down on paper before he lost it again. The eyes, the hair, the—

"Kurt, what are you doing?" Tina called.

"Just struck by an idea!" Kurt lied frantically. "Let me write this down first and I'll be right over!"

He found his ballpoint and immediately knelt down, flipping over his music and placing it onto the chair, scribbling half-hazardly on the blank back. _Hazel_, he wrote, _amber; both eye colors. Beautiful, endless; Dark hair, slicked back. Small, but not very small, played piano—song? _He grasped at the edges of his brain, trying to remember where he'd heard the song before when—

Kurt forgot to breathe.

It struck him—falling like an ax into his brain.

_A name._

* * *

><p><em>"I know now!" Kurt said immediately, and he must have said it differently this time, because anticipation coated the air the minute the words escaped him. "I know you!"<em>

_"What do you know?" the words tumbled out of the boy's mouth._

_"I know your name," Kurt said. "I remembered it!" He let it flutter out of his hands reverently: _

_"**Blaine**."_

_Blaine's expression cracked into something almost disbelieving in its hope. He reached for Kurt's hand, squeezing their palms together as he stepped closer. "Yes," he breathed in a great gust of relief. A stunned, amazed smile began to bloom on his face. "Yes, finally, yes!" he laughed, stumbling closer._

_"I know more," Kurt kept going, the knowledge bursting through the seams of his skin and the air quivering in his chest as Blaine moved closer. _

_"What else do you know?" Blaine's voice was light, breathless in a way Kurt didn't ever remember hearing before. _

_ "Your eyes—they change color."_

_"Yes. What else?"_

_"You were taken away."_

_"Yes."_

_"You went to school with me. You play piano. You were in the choir room."_

_"Yes!"_

_"You love me."_

_"Yes, always, yes!" Blaine was as close as he possibly could be now, radiating warmth. His free hand came to cup Kurt's neck, right under the ear, naked longing baring his eyes. It sparked something in Kurt that was almost like a memory, and his eyes closed at the strange, familiar, intoxicating warmth of Blaine's hand, the intimate closeness of Blaine's face to his own. Kurt's lips parted, unthinking, oversensitive, his tongue tingling._

_"I can't stop thinking about you," he whispered like a secret, too much breath in his voice and he heard Blaine take a shaky inhale. He had to open his eyes at that, to drown in honey-colored irises. "I hear your voice everywhere I go, I see you everywhere, I…" _

_Blaine was glowing with a happiness that stole Kurt's words. _

_"You take my breath away." It tumbled out of his mouth in a cascade of painted air, before he had the chance to even think about speaking. "I won't let them keep you away from me. I **won't**."_

_"We can beat this. I know we can—Kurt—" Blaine's eyes drowned in water, glossy and beautiful and wet. "God, Kurt…" His hand tightened briefly in Kurt's grasp before he tilted his forehead against Kurt's own. "Say my name again."_

_"Blaine," Kurt murmured. Blaine let out a trembling huff of air._

_"Again," he said._

_"Blaine."_

_"Again."_

_"Blaine. Blaine, Blaine, Blaine," he echoed, because he could, because he knew the letters now and it made Blaine let out a shuddering laugh that Kurt joined in on, fingers clutching at each other as they finally, finally took a step towards ending this whole mess._

_Kurt didn't know who moved first; all he knew was that suddenly there were lips against his, and, having begun, he never wanted to stop kissing Blaine. His tongue came out to taste those lips, trace the line of that mouth he had been aching to taste for days. Blaine's lips opened at the slightest suggestion, and a shiver ran down Kurt's spine as they moved together almost automatically, unthinking, like they had done this too many times before. His hand came up to rest at the back of Blaine's neck, their linked hands separating as he moved the other to the small of Blaine's back and Blaine lightly caressed his hip. Kurt whimpered and shifted closer, fisting Blaine's shirt._

_Blaine tore his lips away. "Don't forget me," he said feverishly, intense, pressing his mouth into the skin of Kurt's neck as if to engrave the words there. "**Please**, not again. Don't." His hands gripped him possessively, and something curled, hot and spiked, in the pit of Kurt's stomach._

_Kurt's hands tightened their hold on the boy in his arms. "Not again," he repeated. "Never. I'll remember everything. You'll see!"_

_Blaine tasted his skin like a man dying of thirst, sucking hard at the corner of his jaw, his jugular, the point where his shoulder met his neck. "Say my name again," he said, voice low and roughened over._

_"Blaine," Kurt panted, gasping as Blaine suddenly went for a spot behind his ear that left him boneless. "Blaine," he repeated and Blaine nipped at his skin. "Blaine, Blaine, Blaine, Blaine…" Kurt chanted like a prayer as they sunk into each other, all warmth and pressure and soft touches turning fierce and fiery and desperate. He mouthed it into Blaine's chest, traced it up his arms, scratched it into his back. He whispered it around Blaine's teeth until Blaine claimed his lips and swallowed it from him, and Kurt's eyes closed as he fell into the familiar unfamiliar patterns of playing the notes of Blaine's body. _

**_God_**_, this was it, this was what he'd been searching for—**this** was what had been taken from him! Tears pricked his eyes and Blaine kissed them away as they rolled down his cheeks. He never wanted to wake up again. If he could stay here, in this place, with **this**—with **Blaine**… _

_What had happened that had taken this away? How could he have just forgotten, lost all of this—_

_He whimpered as Blaine nosed against his throat and down his chest, whispering along the words written there, sounding out ever letter. I love you, I love you, I love you…_

_Kurt couldn't stop himself from crying._

**_How_**_ could he have forgotten **this**?_


	4. The Germans Wore Grey, You Wore Blue

_**Title: **Keeping the Balance_  
><strong>Author: <strong>sun_and_rain  
><strong>Rating:<strong> PG-13  
><strong>Warning: <strong>deals with issues of consent, homophobia, and memory loss  
><strong>Summary:<strong> _They met up once a week, to gather stories and fragments of memories like puzzle pieces. No one recognized the name when Kurt first spoke it–a name he'd found buried somewhere in his dreams–but he couldn't shake the feeling that it was important: "Blaine". Whatever had been taken from them had something to do with Blaine._

* * *

><p><strong>AN: **Extra long chapter in apology for how long it's taken me to post this. School has been much busier than I expected. I hope you enjoy this chapter! P.S., I've gotten my first fanart! It's here: theplaylistismagic . tumblr . com /post/21062121037/inspired-by-my-favorite-fanfic-left-over-by-sun. It's done by the amazingly talented **theplaylistismagic**. Go and shower her with love, and then follow her, because she is quality. I adore her art and her fics; she's just supremely talented.

We're still on Kurt with this chapter, by the way. The boy has got quite a lot to say. ;) Please remember to read and review! Though it takes me forever to answer your reviews sometimes, I promise I will eventually answer every single one. You are all lovely, patient readers, and I'm so touched you've all stuck with me. Thank you!

* * *

><p><strong>Chapter Four: The Germans Wore Grey, You Wore Blue<strong>

* * *

><p>When Kurt woke up in the mornings, he awoke to uncomfortably tight sleep pants and a feeling of having left half of himself behind.<p>

Sometimes, he remembered every detail of the dreams he had.

Every touch, no matter how small, was engraved into his memory. Every murmured word of feeling still sent shivers down his spine throughout the day. The dream was becoming hyper-real: the more time he spent with Blaine, the more real the space they inhabited seemed to become. He'd taken to daydreaming about him while he was awake, pretending Blaine's presence filled the classrooms he sat silently in, doodling words he couldn't read and hearing whispers in his ear translating each lovesick phrase back to him. It sent him into fits of meaningless smiles, staring into the air and feeling Blaine's phantom hands on his during difficult parts of the day.

Mercedes had taken to watching him closely—no longer pestering him for information he had made clear he wasn't ready to give, but still obviously concerned. Kurt knew he was beginning to lose touch with the world she inhabited; school and glee club and bullies seemed so insignificant compared to the importance and urgency dictating his meetings with Blaine. Kurt remembering everything was a matter of life and death, Blaine had managed to get across to him—but whose life and whose death remained unclear to Kurt.

All he knew was he couldn't tell Mercedes anything about it. He still had no idea what had led to losing Blaine, or even who took him away (Blaine kept telling him, but Kurt kept forgetting), but he knew, somehow, that Mercedes had played some part in it all. He doubted whatever she had done had been intentional (this was Mercedes, after all), but Kurt was still hesitant to talk to her about it. He had no idea if she would even remember if he explained it to her—and whoever took Blaine might still be watching them. Any clues that Kurt was starting to remember could send unintentional warnings to whoever was watching. _If_ they were watching.

Either way, he had to tip-toe around this whole thing until he had all the facts.

It was getting all the facts that took time. He only remembered half of what Blaine told him anyway, and Blaine had been hesitant to move past simple pieces of information once Kurt remembered his name—afraid that too much of it might weigh so heavily on Kurt's mind it would poke holes, turning it back into the sieve it had been only three nights ago. Instead, he gifted Kurt with brief explanations every visit.

_"I'm Magic," _he'd explained once.

_"I came to your house through a doorway I'd created. I closed it, though, a while ago."_

_"My parents live near you. I don't remember the address, but… but they live near you. You'd like my mother," _Blaine had told Kurt. Something behind his words made Kurt file it away for safekeeping. _Find her,_ something told him. He couldn't remember if it had been Blaine or himself that had said it.

Kurt would complain about the lack of information if he wasn't so hyper-aware of the fact that Blaine had told him everything repeatedly throughout the past two weeks with a well of formidable patience and understanding. And, much as Kurt loathed to admit it, Blaine's fears were justified: Sometimes he would wake up empty, having forgotten everything but the feeling of someone's lips on his and the knowledge that he had lost something. On those days, Kurt spent the whole of his time awake trying to get something—some little understanding—back. He almost never succeeded. Then he'd go to sleep, and see him, a beautiful, hopeful boy and it would come back; Blaine would come back to him, it would _all_ come rushing back to him, and Kurt would spend the rest of their meeting pretending it had been there all along.

He never told Blaine about the days he forgot. Blaine's tearful demands that he not forget him again rang loudly in his ears every time he considered it. But Blaine knew anyway—Kurt could tell. He looked at him on those nights with a kind of intense desperation that was absent on the days Kurt remembered everything. Kurt knew they both dreaded a day he'd fall into sleep and once more see a boy he had no memory of knowing.

_"One step forward, two steps back_," Blaine had muttered once.

_"Story of my life," _Kurt smiled wryly in return.

He'd begun to keep a journal, writing down everything he knew about Blaine in permanent, un-erasable pen. Though it couldn't bring back the memories he lost, it made the days he woke up empty much easier to combat.

Blaine's presence during his waking hours helped with that, too.

It wasn't often that he could feel Blaine there with him during the day, but it happened sometimes (not long enough nor often enough for Kurt to be content). He hadn't been lying when he told Blaine he couldn't stop thinking about him. Even when he woke without the emotional recognition he knew he should be carrying while looking through his journal, he'd spend the rest of the day wondering. Everywhere he looked was a possible spot where he and Blaine had touched, kissed, smiled at each other, laughed. The tree in his backyard felt special, secret and important in some way that Kurt knew had something to do with Blaine. The couch in the living room of his house. The piano in the choir room.

Often, Kurt felt a longing so powerful it sometimes felt like his heart was wringing itself smaller. He fell into daydreams, imagining Blaine next to him in class, beside him on the sofa, watching over him as he was slammed into lockers. His dreams became increasingly more elaborate and romantic, apprehension tinting their meetings as neither of them wanted Kurt to wake up and forget.

_"They're not daydreams,"_ Blaine had told him once. "_I'm here with you. I'm with you."_

The kiss following that declaration had been particularly intense.

His grades were dropping. His family had begun to look at him in concern. He barely sung in glee club.

Kurt ignored it all, and slept.

* * *

><p><em>"You must remember this," Blaine sang quietly as they sat together on the swing, "a kiss is just a kiss. A sigh is just a sigh…"<em>

_"The fundamental things apply," Kurt joined in, his head on Blaine's shoulder. Their voices petered out into the nothingness surrounding them._

_Kurt felt as Blaine half-hummed another line before giving up. _

_They sat in silence, curled up on the swing._

_"Sometimes it feels like this is what's real. And the other is the dream."_

_Kurt tucked his arm around Blaine's waist and repositioned himself. "A bad dream."_

_"Yes."_

_"Me too," he said._

_Blaine breathed in audibly. "Why can't we stay like this?" he said suddenly, fiercely. "Why can't this be what's real?"_

_Kurt was empty of words._

_Blaine deflated of energy as fast as he filled with it. "Sorry," he murmured._

_Kurt squeezed Blaine's waist and said nothing. Blaine kicked his feet off the ground and rocked the swing again._

_"No matter what the future brings…" Kurt sang softly._

_Blaine moved, curling around Kurt and nuzzling into his hair. "How's Karofsky?"_

_"He still hasn't said anything yet. He keeps staring, but he won't approach me."_

_Blaine muttered something that sounded a lot like 'good.' "I don't want you alone with him," he said. "He might know something, but if you decide to approach him, I want you to bring Mercedes with you."_

_Kurt shifted uncomfortably, letting a bubble of unease form around them. After a while, Blaine pulled back, concerned. _

_"…I'm not telling Mercedes," Kurt admitted quietly._

_Blaine frowned. "Why not?" _

_"Because she took you away from me," it came spitting vehemently out of him, and both Kurt and Blaine drew back in surprise at the outburst._

_"What?" Blaine asked incredulously. "Where did you get that idea?"_

_"I remember it," Kurt told him. "I just remember feeling it—she had something to do with you being taken away."_

_Blaine's lightly scratched Kurt's back. "Kurt, she cares about you. Anything she might have done she did out of that care. Don't blame her for trying to help you."_

_"Help me with **what**?" Kurt asked in irritation—and here was the one piece of information he constantly forgot. Kurt could remember weeks of interaction with Blaine, whole nights of warmth and playfulness and arguing—but the days leading up to their separation remained as blank and empty as they ever were. No matter how many times Blaine told him what had happened—no matter how much foreboding hung heavy over his head—he remained clueless: leaving him with nothing but an unexplainable certainty that time was running out. _

_And Blaine had stopped telling him. Or Blaine told him, and it slid off of his mind like oil, unable to sink in and penetrate his brain. Only Blaine's unswayable conviction that these meetings were a matter of life and death stuck with him, and the building frustration Kurt felt at his own inability to comprehend **why **was slowly chipping away at him._

_"I still can't talk to her about it," he mumbled sullenly. "People could be watching."_

_"You don't trust her anymore," Blaine said frankly, seeing through him as he always did. His hand gripped Kurt tighter. "Don't let them ruin your relationship with her, Kurt. Don't. They twist things, turn you into someone you aren't—you can't stop them. Don't blame Mercedes. Please."_

_Kurt looked up at that, watching him carefully. _

_"Who are they turning you into?" he asked._

_Blaine only sent him a sad smile. He looked years older than he was—drained and tired and defeated. Kurt hated when he got that look._

_"I'll talk to her," he promised. _

_"Thank you," Blaine said. He pulled at Kurt slightly, and Kurt relaxed back down onto Blaine's shoulder. _

_He kissed Blaine's chest and picked up the verse._

_"It's still the same old story: a fight for love and glory," he began._

_"A case of do or die," Blaine joined in._

_"The world will always welcome lovers," they sang. "As time goes by…"_

* * *

><p>The rumor going around the school was that Rachel Berry's sanity had finally flown the coop. She had attended school for one day during the week: she was silent but stoic, and the silence lasted until she entered the choir room—where, for no reason anyone could discern, she burst into spontaneous tears and left school immediately, refusing to discuss with any of the glee club members what was going on, and even declining the opportunity to turn the whole problem into a dramatic, show-stopping number.<p>

Quinn drove her home, and remained as tight-lipped about the situation for the rest of the day as Rachel herself had been.

Finn was worried; Kurt could tell, because he had begun snapping at everyone for no apparent reason. He had even started a fight with Karofsky when he caught him staring at Kurt—Puck joined in, and it quickly devolved into an all-out brawl. Rehearsals for glee club had been tense anyway, with everybody on edge due to the presence of the football players, and Couch Bieste and Schue were essential in keeping everyone in line. It was only Kurt's vehement assertion that he was fine, that Karofsky hadn't done or said anything wrong to him, that got Puck and Finn to back down. Kurt was almost sure he was touched at the gesture, even though the motivation for it was a little muddled. It was the misguided thought that counted, he supposed.

Karofsky had sent him a look filled with equal parts gratitude and resentment after the fight had broken up. He then proceeded to ignore him for the rest of rehearsal.

Kurt knew he was going to have talk to him in private, but Blaine's warning not to do so alone clanged loudly in his ear every time he thought about approaching him. He had promised to talk to Mercedes—but Kurt still wasn't sure he was ready to let her back in.

So, instead, he found himself standing outside Rachel Berry's house on a Saturday afternoon, trying to figure out whether he should knock or ring the doorbell.

He settled on ringing the doorbell.

A man in glasses and grayish-brown hair opened the door. "Yes, hello, what do you want?" he asked, voice all rapid business. Kurt blinked.

"Um, I wanted to talk to Rachel…?"

"Are you the boy who kept calling her?" the man asked firmly. Kurt assumed he meant Finn.

"No," he said slowly. "I'm Kurt Hummel. I'm in glee club with her?"

The man's eyes lit up. "Ah, Kurt! Yes, Rachel's told us about you." (Kurt raised his eyebrows at that. _She had?_) "Hold on, I'll go see if she's well enough to see you." The man (whom Kurt could only assume was one of the Mr. Berrys) ushered him inside and went upstairs, leaving Kurt alone in the living room.

Kurt glanced around curiously, taking in the various trophies and pictures of Rachel decorating every inch of the mantelpiece. It definitely looked like a house Rachel Berry would live in. He fiddled with the top of the container of cookies he'd made, wondering again if it had been too much to bring. He hadn't ever really tried being friends with Rachel before. He wondered what it was Rachel had told her dads about him.

A few more minutes passed and Kurt sat gingerly down on the couch.

He hadn't told Blaine about Rachel. Not without couching it in vagaries and uncertainties—the same way he had discussed Karofsky. He had no idea if whatever was happening with her had anything to do with Blaine—he didn't even know if whatever was happening with _Karofsky_ had anything to do with Blaine—and he didn't want to get either of their hopes up in pursuing an ally that might prove to be utterly useless after all. Not when he still had no idea how this whole situation had happened.

Not when Blaine was clearly having such a hard time this week.

But he couldn't let another minute go without investigating. Not anymore. Being careful was all fine and good, but Kurt was beginning to feel that the time they had was growing too short to spend it dawdling. His meetings with Blaine had consisted entirely of fantasies this week; places of comfort, loving actions, soothing thoughts. Every time they met up, it seemed that Blaine clung tighter, kissed harder.

He didn't want to speculate on why that was so.

If he couldn't talk to Karofsky, he would risk Rachel's crazy. He had to. He had to start feeling like he was _doing _something, or he was going to end up exploding into angry power ballads in the middle of rehearsal. And it wasn't going to be pretty power ballads, either.

Whoever was watching him could just shove it.

Kurt looked up hopefully as Mr. Berry came down the stairs, face falling when the man shook his head. "She doesn't feel well enough to see anyone today," Mr. Berry explained, an apologetic smile on his face. "Maybe you can come back another time."

Kurt saw the genuine concern hidden in his eyes and found himself standing up. So her parents didn't know why Rachel had suddenly turned into a recluse, either.

Biting his lip, he shifted his grip on the container of cookies, before awkwardly holding them out. "They're vegan," he said. "Um… can you tell Rachel I brought them for her?"

Mr. Berry smiled at him, gently taking the container. "Thank you, I'll tell her," he said. "I'm sure she'll appreciate it."

_Enough to talk to me next time,_ Kurt didn't add.

He was ushered out the door with the same friendliness in which he was ushered in.

The door shut.

Kurt stared at it.

…It was time to talk to Quinn.

* * *

><p>"No," Quinn said as the rest of the glee club finally filed into the auditorium. "I told you I don't want to talk about it, Kurt. I don't gossip about my friends."<p>

Kurt would have contested several elements of that statement (the first being, _since when did Quinn consider Rachel a friend?_), but bit his tongue. trying to keep it civil. "I only want to know—"

"Just drop it," Quinn said firmly. Kurt chewed on the inside of his cheek as Puck came up to them.

"What's going on?" Puck asked, sitting down next to Quinn protectively.

"Nothing," Kurt bit out. "Thanks for the help, Quinn." He looked at her one more time before moving to a seat closer to the stage. _So much for that. _Quinn watched him go, unimpressed.

Kurt huffed as he dropped into his seat. Mercedes sat down shyly next to him. "Hey," she said softly. Kurt glanced at her and managed a small smile.

"Hey," he responded, keeping his eyes on the stage.

He shouldn't be angry with her, he knew. He _wasn't _angry with her, not really; he was angry at the situation. He wasn't angry at her.

…He couldn't even ask her why she'd done it. He didn't even know what she had _done_—and she didn't even remember having done whatever she'd done, anyway, so it would just be confusing and stupid and... He was sure she was already confused, and probably feeling hurt, but…

But Blaine wasn't with them. Blaine was stuck in some horrible place that was steadily chipping away at his dependable composure, that was tensing his shoulders and weighing down his face with exhaustion and sometimes, flickering quickly, fear. Blaine wasn't _with Kurt,_ where he was supposed to be, where Kurt _needed _him to be.

And Mercedes had played some small part in making that happen.

Karofsky walked into the auditorium, trailing after Azimio and one of the other football players Kurt had never felt the need to know. An itching started up underneath Kurt's skin. If he couldn't talk to Rachel, he _had_ to talk to Karofsky. One of them _had _to know something—who had taken Blaine, what had happened, where they'd gone, why no one remembered anything—but he had promised Blaine he wouldn't talk to Karofsky alone.

Kurt glanced at Mercedes out of the corner of his eye, unconsciously grinding his teeth together.

…He didn't even know if she'd believe him. She had shown no signs of remembering Blaine at all since he'd been taken away. He didn't even know if she'd known him before their memories were wiped.

He bit his lip and turned to pay attention to Schue and Bieste, who entered the stage as if preparing to go into battle. He felt the brush of someone's fingers on the back of his hand.

_Blaine_.

…Not yet. He wasn't ready to talk yet.

"We're working on choreography today," Schue announced. "Let's try something different and mix it up. Mike, Sam, and Kurt, will you come up here and demonstrate?"

Kurt felt the hot glare of the football players behind him as he walk up to the stage. Ever since Finn had started that fight with Karofsky, tensions were racketing high—and Kurt, unfortunately, seemed to have become the goat upon which they piled most of the blame.

The music started and Kurt, Mike, and Sam began to dance.

"Did you guys practice this together in the locker room third period?" one of the football players called.

"I ain't doing no gay shit like that!"

Someone whistled. "Move those hips!"

"Knock it off!" Coach Bieste snarled. "The next person who makes a comment like that is off the team! Got it?"

They quieted, but Kurt could still feel the heat of their glaring.

He chewed on his tongue and counted the minutes until he could sleep again.

* * *

><p><em>"A picnic?" he asked as he looked at the red-and-white checked blanket spread out before him. He could feel sunlight and smell flowers, though the only evidence of either of those things were the daisy chains Blaine was linking together from his spot on the blanket. "This is new."<em>

_Blaine smiled up at him softly, the exhaustion that was becoming ever-present in him clinging to the corners of his eyes. "I felt like doing something special," he said. "It's been a hard week for us and… I want to just be with you tonight. If that's okay?"_

_Kurt clasped their hands together, kneeling down and kissing the tenseness from Blaine's eyes. "That's just fine," he said. He quietly studied the relief that seeped out of Blaine's shoulders, turning him pliant in Kurt's arms. Blaine leaned in to kiss him, carefully slipping one of the daisy chains onto Kurt's head and letting his hands trail lingeringly through his hair once he had it placed. They moved, Kurt leaning until he was lying on his back and Blaine following, sucking on Kurt's bottom lip, keeping them connected. The crown Blaine had made Kurt crushed slightly in the back as Kurt's head relaxed onto the blanket._

_"I miss you," Blaine whispered, sounding so young suddenly._

_Kurt brought a hand up to cradle his cheek. "I miss you, too."_

_Blaine let out a small sound and buried his face into Kurt's neck, sighing. Kurt closed his eyes and carded his fingers through the hair at the base of Blaine's neck, melting into the blanket as Blaine melted into him. His fingers traced the letters stitched into Kurt's forearm, lazily teasing the edges of his sleeve and dipping under it to touch the hidden skin it covered._

**_This shouldn't be an escape for either of us,_**_ someone whispered in his ear. Kurt thought Blaine had said that, once, but he couldn't remember when._

_"I remembered something today," Kurt spoke into the silence. Blaine hummed a question, drawing patterns around Kurt's elbow. _

_"Be careful, it's my heart," Kurt sang in response. "It's not my watch you're holding: it's my heart."_

_Blaine chuckled softly._

_"Holiday Inn," he murmured happily. "Finn was feeling unreasonably triumphant about that movie, considering he didn't want to watch it."_

_"He thought he was participating in a secret matchmaking conspiracy," Kurt informed him. "We were so obvious even Finn noticed our sexual tension, apparently."_

_"Hmm," Blaine nipped at that spot behind Kurt's ear and Kurt shivered. "You're too sexy for your own good, Hummel. How could I resist your wiles? I bet you get all the boys back home."_

_"I have a moderately-sized harem," Kurt allowed. "Certainly not **all **the boys…"_

_ "I knew I made you that crown for a reason."_

_Kurt laughed and laced their fingers together briefly, dragging his fingers up to explore Blaine's arm. _

_Blaine sucked in a breath as Kurt's thumb stroked the tender part of his wrist._

_"That feels…" Blaine curled around Kurt, hiding his face in Kurt's neck._

_Kurt frowned at the tenseness suddenly rounding Blaine's shoulders._

_"What is it?" he asked. _

_Blaine's breath hitched and he shook his head._

_"What happened today?" Kurt pushed, trying to coax Blaine gently away from his neck. Blaine shook his head, pressing his face in closer._

_"You can't tell me," he said slowly, frowning. "They told you not to tell me, didn't they?"_

_"Not just you," Blaine tightened his grip, curling even closer. A hot trickle of tears wet Kurt's neck, and Kurt, surprised, drew back a little. "I'm sorry," Blaine whispered. _

_"Don't be," Kurt said, wrapping his arms around him. "I'm here."_

_"I know." Tears began to roughen Blaine's voice. "I feel…" His body began to shake with silent crying, and Kurt frowned in bewilderment; clung to him tightly. _

**_I feel safe with you_**_, someone whispered._

_"Blaine—Shh, Blaine…"_

_"I don't want to wake up," Blaine cried into Kurt's neck. Water filmed over Kurt's eyes as he held on, peppered kisses into Blaine's hair, shushed him tenderly. He moved their bodies so they could wrap around each other, weaving themselves into the other until they could pretend it was impossible to separate. _

_"It's okay, I'm here," Kurt hushed. "It's okay."_

_"I don't want to go back," Blaine sobbed as if he hadn't heard, shuddering in Kurt's arms. "Please, I don't want to go back."_

**_This shouldn't be an escape. Not for either of us._**

_"I'll find you," Kurt said fiercely into Blaine's ear, fisting into Blaine's shirt. "Stay strong for me. I'll find you."_

_He could only hold on as Blaine cried harder._

* * *

><p>He had to talk to Mercedes.<p>

Today.


	5. Wonderful Thing, Wireless, Isn't It?

_**Title: **Keeping the Balance_  
><strong>Author: <strong>sun_and_rain  
><strong>Rating:<strong> PG-13  
><strong>Warning: <strong>deals with issues of consent, homophobia, and memory loss  
><strong>Summary:<strong> _They met up once a week, to gather stories and fragments of memories like puzzle pieces. No one recognized the name when Kurt first spoke it–a name he'd found buried somewhere in his dreams–but he couldn't shake the feeling that it was important: "Blaine". Whatever had been taken from them had something to do with Blaine._

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><p><strong>AN: **Part one of a two-part chapter! This one was giving me problems, and I felt so badly not updating on time, so I split Blaine's chapter in half. Hopefully the rest of it will come smoothly soon, but for now, here's the first half! I'm sorry for the wait. 3 Hello all you new readers, by the way! Thank you for the lovely reviews; it means so much that you're enjoying this story. I know it's intense-it's about to get a hell of a lot more complicated. Let's see what Blaine has to say about all of this!

P.S., I think I need a better summary for this fic. Anyone have any ideas?

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><p><strong>Chapter Five A: Wonderful Thing, Wireless, Isn't It?<br>**

* * *

><p>Someone's lips were—kissing. Someone was kissing him, opening their mouth and claiming—<em>Kurt?<em>

A tug of someone else's arousal hit his stomach, the taste on his lips beginning to sour into something new, tartly flavored like he'd never had before and—_oh_, his body was arching shuddering spasming and hot liquid vats of burning fire slashed deep grooves up his wrists arms, veins, bleeding out and up through his tongue, mouth, hands, fingers, interlaced like fake parodies of the hands they had once been holding, screaming, screaming but making no sound because the sound was boiling the sound was hot fire the sound was magic, _Magic_, wrenched out of him and ripping and—

Blaine cried out as he _shoved_, slamming a powerful urge to _feel repulsed _into the body above him. The connection between them broke off, brittle and sharp, and he coughed violently as the body was repelled to the other end of the room.

"Get—!" The rest of the sentence tangled in his throat as he caught sight of who had been kissing him: Sebastian. Blaine trembled as he tried to push himself up into a sitting position, finally letting himself acknowledge the low undercurrent of shock and attraction (and, powerfully, the repulsion he'd put there) that had felt too unfamiliar to be Kurt. His limbs shook. Fuck, his head was _pounding_.

"What the hell did you think you were doing?" he demanded, voice too weak to be as authoritative as he wanted it to be. He licked his lips unconsciously, still tickling with the flavor of someone else (_not Kurt_), and he suddenly wanted to throw up. Sebastian stared at him with something resembling fear, eyes wide and wary in the corner of the room.

"You wanted me to," he answered slowly.

Blaine glared. "Bullshit."

"You did," Sebastian protested, and Blaine couldn't feel anything but alarm and indignation behind his words. "You kept going on about how hot it was, and to take away the heat, and I touched you and you started shaking—"

Blaine pushed once more to sit up and hissed as almost all of his muscles suddenly gave out. He hit the floor again painfully, knocking hard against the wood underneath him. When had he gotten to the floor? Hadn't he been sitting on the bed a few minutes ago? Hadn't—a pained groan escaped him as he tried again, body trembling too hard from exertion to even get on his hands and knees. He ended up back on the floor. It was so hot. The magic inside of his veins felt like millions of stinging cuts.

"What did you to do me?" he panted, trying to find Sebastian again through the haze beginning to flood his vision.

"I told you, you just started convulsing. I was _trying_ to take away some of the magic." He couldn't tell if the annoyance was coming from Sebastian or downstairs (_or himself_). Dalton throbbed like wounded bruises through his blood cells, swelling his brain and his _head, god, his head…_

"Convulsing…" he murmured, curling onto his side as he tried once more to find the strength to get up. Small, trickling tears of sweat ran down his back and his neck as he grabbed the bed next to him and pulled to lever himself up. Worry, panic, anticipation, anger, wanting, fear… his mind was soaked in feeling like alcohol, and he felt drunk, dizzy—lightheaded—so _tired_, _exhausted_, like he'd just spent hours with the world on his back, and he couldn't tell who was who. _It was so hot._ "I don't remember," he began, breathless from the heat. "I don't remember that."

"Yeah, well, I'm told most people _don't_ remember having a seizure, so…"

"A seizure," Blaine repeated blankly. His mouth was too dry to ably swallow back the rising panic at the word. A_ seizure_? Fragments of a passage floated at the front of his mind from one of the books he'd dived into when he'd first agreed to Wes' plan: _"…inability to sustain… temperature… febrile seizures, which are uncommon in adults but not unheard of…"_ This was getting too far, too fast, too much. He pulled, and slipped again, sliding down to the ground and letting his head thump back against the floor. A small cry escaped him as he tilted his head back, squirmed in the heat, _hot, too hot, _his eyes lidded and hazy. "God, it's too hot," he whispered. "I can't… focus, I can't move."

"That's the seizure, too," Sebastian's voice was suddenly much closer. Blaine blinked rapidly, trying to clear his vision. "The not-moving thing."

A hand on his wrist, stroking lightly, and Sebastian was suddenly so much louder around his heart. _Smugness. Anticipation. Caution._ "Are you going to freak out again if I try to help you this time?"

"That depends," Blaine said lowly, watching as Sebastian leaned in too close. "Are you going to try to kiss me again?"

He froze inches from Blaine's lips. Blaine watched warily as Sebastian met his gaze in challenge. He stayed where he was, too close and daring him to do something about it as his fingers slipped provocatively through Blaine's own. Blaine's breath hitched.

Sebastian smirked.

Blaine cried out this time when Sebastian tugged, an involuntary sound slipping from his lips as _pleasure-pain_ flushed through him and his awareness sharpened to Sebastian's provocation, to his teasing, baiting half-smirk and the arousal singing so loud in his chest he couldn't tell whose it was anymore. All of his muscles tensed as heat was dragged out of him in strings, pulled into Sebastian's fingers—and Sebastian's lips, so close, too close, and Blaine jerked up briefly and missed meeting his mouth by _decameters—_and just as Blaine opened his mouth to—

He wrenched back as Sebastian let go and pulled away. His body felt warm again, as opposed to hot, muscles no longer too weak to move. Sebastian had made them new again. The itching of Sebastian's wanting for him crept under his skin like insects.

Blaine pushed himself up, standing on slightly shaky legs and moved as far away as possible.

Downstairs slipped inside the cracks of his body like insidious wisps of black smoke as he moved. Foreign emotion. His skin shifted uncomfortably as it built up like cholesterol inside of him.

"It's too much," he said, pressing his hands to stop the ache from starting in his head. "This isn't working."

"Looks like it's working fine to me." He felt Sebastian's eyes on him and he turned to face him.

"The fever spikes until I start having a seizure, and you come in who-knows-how-much-later to take away the heat?" Blaine leaned against the wall, too tired. "I need to find a way to stop it building, I need to…" He squeezed his eyes shut as his head gave a particularly nasty throb. "I need to block them off."

Sebastian was frowning. "Your head is still hurting?"

Blaine slumped against the wall as an argument downstairs spiked swords behind his eyes. He pinched the bridge of his nose, trying to relieve the pressure. "It just started up again," he breathed out.

"That was fast. It hasn't even been two minutes since we took it away."

"Mm."

"Maybe you should've let me kiss you after all." There was a light brush of good-natured teasing and a pinching of resentment accompanying the words. Blaine looked over at Sebastian.

"It wouldn't have made a difference. It builds too fast—there are too many people downstairs, and those stupid—" he glanced at the herbs hanging in the doorway. "I can't build walls, Andrew will know the second he steps into the room." And then he would know someone else had been visiting Blaine besides him, and all of Blaine's plans would collapse in the time it took Andrew to tear his walls back down. "I need to—" He breathed in sharply as a huge wave of frustration and fear rose up inside of him, and something cut off, suddenly, just as it had that first day he'd been following Rachel, just as it had with that girl—

Blaine slid down the wall, hiding his eyes in his hands and fighting tears. _Get a hold of yourself._ "I need those herbs gone," he rasped. "I need to be able to release it on my own, without your help. I need…" Giddiness clashed with dread clashed with yearning. Worry close by, anger farther away—or even closer, he couldn't tell—humor—too many, there was too much, he— "God, I can't _focus!_" he gasped. His head felt like it was going to split in half, and he couldn't tell if he was still breathing or just drowning inside an ocean of somebody else's tears—

A hand circled his wrist, the thumb caressing his pulse point. He inhaled a shaky breath as his attention began to narrow on the calculated grip of those fingers, the circular movements of that thumb. Leaning his head back against the wall, he tried his best to relegate the rest to background noise. Kurt was louder than the others now that he was touching him. An anchor. Kurt was his anchor. _Let everything else drain away, just focus on the physical_.

The thumb tracing circles into his skin.

The slow exhale of his lungs.

The dull, throbbing pressure of the blood in his head.

_This is you. This is all you._

_Focus._

…Kurt…

Blaine sighed a thank you and opened his eyes to see Sebastian kneeling in front of him, scrutinizing him carefully. _Oh._ His heart gave a frightened jolt. Not Kurt-that had been Sebastian.

"You're one fascinating piece of ass. I hope you know that," Sebastian told him seriously. Blaine felt humor twitch his lips.

"I—that's—a new one."

Sebastian's hand was still on his wrist.

"So…" he prompted. "You need…?" Blaine bit his lips, trying to keep the clarity Sebastian's hand afforded him while ignoring what the other boy was feeling.

"I need… something that will dull the effect of those herbs," he said slowly. "I can't take them down. But if I can get some kind of counteragent…"

"You can hide whatever I bring you," Sebastian finished for him. "So you can get some control back without anyone else knowing."

"Yes," Blaine said, sending a strange look Sebastian's way as a weird hostility radiated from him. Sebastian just smirked back.

"I'll go look a few things up," he said. "Talk to a few birds."

"All right…" Blaine answered slowly. Sebastian's hand was still on his wrist. Blaine glanced down at it curiously, and Sebastian didn't move.

Then:

"…You should stop visiting that boy," Sebastian suddenly blurted out. Blaine blinked in surprise. "It just makes you unaccustomed to how the real world feels. When you come back, you always have more trouble adjusting. You should just stay here. Let your mind adjust and get used to it."

Blaine's heart plummeted deep into his stomach, a swollen anger rising in his throat. "So what, are you saying you're on Andrew's side now?" he accused. Sebastian's hand tightened on his wrist and irritation flushed up his veins.

"I'm saying you're being stupid," he said fiercely. "Every time you visit that boy, you come back more and more unable to deal with all the shit that's being thrown at you. I'm not denying it's shit, Blaine, but you have to find a way to deal with it that doesn't mean running away."

"I'm not running away," Blaine said fiercely, jerking his wrist away from Sebastian's hold. The world slammed back into him, worries and exultation and laughter and irritation screaming loud in his ears. He breathed sharply and stood up. "We're not talking about this anymore."

Sebastian stood from his position on the floor, towering over him. His emotions were more distant now, but Blaine could feel the exasperation was coming from him as if he had never let go of his wrist. "I'm not going to keep helping you if you don't actually want to be helped!"

"I'm anchoring myself. Kurt is my anchor," Blaine told him, voice low. "I'm not running away."

Sebastian's eyes were heavy with judgment and Blaine felt it crawling down his neck.

"Then you need to find a different one," he said. "Because this one is dragging you under the water. I'm not sticking around to watch you drown, killer."

Blaine felt something inside of himself plunge, and his balance fell, as if he had moved forward expecting another upward step and landed on the same level he'd started on. His heart clenched in his chest, his eyes widening and Sebastian turned from him. Blaine's jaw worked silently as he watched him walk away, his ears ringing with words and implications he was having trouble processing. A sudden swell of terror inflated his lungs and he called after Sebastian urgently: "Bring the counteragent!" His body tensed as Sebastian ducked under herbs through the doorway, breath fluttering in his throat. "Sebastian!"

Knuckles rapped against the wall in acknowledgment. Blaine breathed again.

Sebastian disappeared around the corner, and Blaine stared at the distant window he had passed.

It was blue outside.

He leaned back against the wall and sucked on his bottom lip, staring at the cloudless sky.

_…Let go of Kurt._

No.

He would never be able to do that.

His eyes slipped closed and he tilted his head back, breathing through the pain of his headache. Calm blue-green eyes swam behind his lids.

Blaine sighed and focused on them; on the almond shape of them, the curved eyelashes, the way they looked when squinted with a smile. The way they sparkled with a laugh. Cool, clear blue-green.

A poisonous anger gouged through his ribs and it was like someone had flicked still-burning embers into his blood. His legs gave out and he fell, hitting his shoulder against the wall as he tried to grab the stones for balance. His knees protested as they smashed into the floor, hands coming out to break his fall. His fingers curled into fists on the ground, his teeth clenching as he felt his skin begin to sweat again. Breathe through it. Breathe through it.

It was too loud in his head. Too sharp in his veins. Everything tensed.

Breathe through it. Breathe.

He let out a forceful huff of air as another stab of laughter-anger-hilarity sent thousands of pins pricking his skin, his mind fogging. _These are your fingers. These are your toes. These are your hands. These are your arms._ He felt himself curling up, setting his elbows down on the ground and hiding his head in between them. _These are your feet. These are your knees. This is your head._ Sebastian's final words echoed ominously around his brain. _I'm not sticking around to watch you drown, killer._ He fought a violent urge to retch as his body filled with foreign bodies, foreign energy, foreign emotion. _This is your throat. This is your chest. This is your heart._ His stomach quivered with the need to _rebel rebel rebel _and he slowly moved onto his side, careful movements coiling his body into itself. _This is your face. These are your eyes. Blink and prove it. These are your eyes. This is you. These are you. This is what is you._

Blaine swallowed against the lump in his throat and pictured cool, cool blue-green. (_Get used to it, _Sebastian's voice whispered.) His eyes snapped open. Wide, they bore into the hanging herbs above the doorway.

_It was so hot. _

Blaine trembled, and stared. Find an anchor, breathe through it. This is you, breathe through it. He was so dizzy. He…

_It was too hot._

…He couldn't. He couldn't, there was nothing else, there was no one else. He _couldn't_.

His eyes rolled up as the lids slipped shut.

He thought of Kurt.


	6. Can You Walk That Valley A Little Faster

_**Title: **Keeping the Balance_  
><strong>Author: <strong>sun_and_rain  
><strong>Rating:<strong> PG-13  
><strong>Warning: <strong>deals with issues of consent, homophobia, and memory loss

****Summary:**** _No one recognized the name when Kurt first spoke it–a name he'd found buried somewhere in his dreams–but he couldn't shake the feeling that it was important: "Blaine". Whatever had been taken from them had something to do with Blaine._

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><p><strong>AN: **Part two! Finally! Sorry for the huge wait, everyone, real life got in the way. This month is going to be very off-and-on, because I'm in the middle of moving, so I apologize ahead of time if updating gets crazy. I will do my best to keep my update schedule fairly regular, but in the meantime, I appreciate your patience so, so much. You all have been wonderful and so understanding, and I can't tell you how much I appreciate that. For those of you lurking, don't be shy! Let me know what you think! Who knows-you might influence what direction the story goes in!

And now, without further ado:

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><p><strong>Chapter Five B: Can You Walk Through That Valley A Little Faster?<strong>

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><p>Blaine left his body to find himself in Kurt's eyes. He traced the maps etched into Kurt's skin, read the constellations in his pupils, and tasted the unformed words that reminded him of what he was forgetting in the empty open room that was his prison back at Dalton. Kurt carried a part of him in his limbs and gave it unknowingly back to him whenever Blaine asked: reminding Blaine who he was, what he liked, what he thought of things.<p>

How he _felt_.

Blaine didn't know how he felt anymore—not until he visited Kurt. Too many voices singing too many songs in his head made it hard to interpret what the individual tunes were—it was all just violins and pounding drums and blaring horns and piano, bass, guitar. Soon it would all be one huge, jumbled, indistinguishable noise, and Blaine hated that he was ending up just as Erickson wanted—all his efforts to fight it slowly revealed as useless. No matter how much or how often he tried to clear his head, he couldn't get himself to focus. He held himself in anxious anticipation that he would one morning wake up and find it already there: a thick oatmeal of _loud_ that would coat his ears and his brain and his throat, and drive him as insane as his mother had warned him he would become were Dalton to find him.

But Kurt: he helped him fight it. Kurt helped him clear the noise—helped Blaine just be _Blaine_ again.

Kurt was the only one who could drive everything else away.

There were days that Kurt came to him locked up and empty, and a red terror swelled Blaine's throat raw when he met Kurt's eyes and saw nothing in their reflection. On those days, he clung tighter, kissed harder, tried to force Kurt open and find the memories that had somehow drilled themselves deep into Kurt's subconscious while he'd been away. He _needed_ Kurt to remember; Kurt was the only one who knew him, who could show him who he was—and with each passing day, it became harder and harder to remember what parts were his and what parts were others'. If Blaine lost himself completely and had no way to find himself again… he didn't know what he would become.

Worse, he_ did _know what _Kurt_ would become: a cold, limp corpse left for Burt and Carole and Finn to discover one horrible morning a few weeks' time from now when Kurt's body shut down. An empty container, graffitied in naively repetitious _I love you_s—words Blaine had stupidly written over and over and over, as if the phrase itself was something magical or protective or even—or even anything remotely _helpful_. As if by weaving it into Kurt's skin, Blaine could ensure Kurt would never forget him, would love him back, would—

Stay _alive_.

But it did none of that.

Kurt still looked at him sometimes with empty eyes. Kurt still forgot him when he woke up on a morning. Kurt was still going to _die_—and the more they stayed trapped in this stasis, sliding backward ten steps for every one they took forward, the harder Blaine fought to keep moving. Because what happened to him would happen to him: he had made his bed—that day three years ago, when he stepped out the front door and never thought to look back—and it would have been stupid to think he would have never had to lie in it after. But he could not—_would not_—bring Kurt down with him. Blaine had dragged him into this mess, so Blaine had to find a way to help him out of it.

Kurt _had_ to survive this.

Or else… or else Blaine didn't know what. He would go insane. He would burn the world down. He would…

Fail.

Again.

He thought of Rachel; determined, lonely Rachel, who only needed a friend. Karofsky, who kept making the wrong choices but struggled so hard with thinking of the right ones. Finn, and Puck, and Mercedes.

Blaine hadn't even _looked_ back at his parents that day Dalton had whisked him off.

Dark, horribly sad eyes flashed before him. Slitting wrists in a bathroom stall.

He had failed her, just as he had failed all of them—just as he had failed himself. Blaine had always been able to find a way out before. He could feel every secret anyone kept from him, and he was smart; he could get by. But it was different this time. He had underestimated how much Erickson's operation would cost him; how quickly he would lose control; how many people were truly on his side.

Wes had promised him he'd be there if Blaine ever wanted out. Blaine didn't know how much clearer he could be if running away didn't scream "I want out" to Wes. And Sebastian hadn't come back to visit him in weeks.

…Days…?

He couldn't tell time anymore. He couldn't tell anything anymore. His life consisted of Kurt, Andrew, and increasingly dissonant strings plucking inside the hollows of his body, too much and too quick for him to tell what emotions they were supposed to be playing.

He didn't think he could get himself out of this one. Not this time.

But he could get Kurt out.

He _had_ to get Kurt out.

If he got Kurt out, maybe… maybe Kurt could make sure the bits of Blaine he carried with him would make it out, too.

* * *

><p><em>"Blaine! Blaine, don't-!"<em>

_It was like she was speaking to him through jello. He saw her mouth moving out of the corner of his eye, but her words came to him delayed and muffled, fighting through the viscous liquid that suddenly made up the air around him only to fall limply, just short of his ears. _

_There was a boy outside. There was a boy, and he…_

_He couldn't…_

_Blaine's throat was dry, his tongue thick and heavy in his mouth as he met dark eyes through the glass pane of the window. 'Come outside,' the boy mouthed. And, unthinkingly—he did._

_"Blaine!" _

_Hands grabbed at him but he turned the doorknob anyway, and as he walked up to the boy, he felt himself getting fuzzy. The boy was so **loud**; Blaine had never heard anyone as loud or as clear or as… it was overwhelming—eagerness and hope and attraction, buzzing through his limbs as if he were floating, and so **strong**, aimed at Blaine, about Blaine, and Blaine had never felt anyone feeling things like that toward him—having spent two years feeling only his parents and the odd visitor who came to the door, suddenly being exposed to someone who felt so **powerfully**… who was… mesmerizing…_

_Electricity kicked down his chest._

_"Blaine Anderson," the boy said. Blaine couldn't look away._

_"How do you know my name?" he heard himself ask. The boy's face split into a grin, and a huge gust of **triumph** almost knocked Blaine over. He held out his hand and Blaine stared at it._

_"I'm Andrew Jackson," he said._

_"Like the president." Blaine kept his eyes on the hand._

_Andrew smirked. "Exactly."_

_Andrew's intense anticipation sparked through his veins. Slowly, confused, Blaine grasped the hand in front of him. _

_"Blaine! Get away from him!" his mother's voice was suddenly clear as a bell. Blinking, he turned to—_

_It **ripped** through him like a chainsaw and he gasped raggedly as his knees gave, his eyesight whiting out and his body plummeting and something **forced** its way past his ribs, clawed down his heart and it was foreign, strange, bliss, agony, it was pain-pleasure-pain he was going to scream as it took hold of him and **dragged**—_

_Blaine choked on a soundless cry as it disappeared and he stumbled forward, into arms that circled him protectively, possessively, someone else's awe and giddiness wrapping ropes around his too-fast-beating shock. What was—what had—? He couldn't stop shaking. _

_"…contract with your family…" some man's voice was saying, and his mother answered back, angry, scared, and the man was regretful but firm, and his father was terrified, but all of them were watery and washed out compared to the boy—Andrew—holding him tightly in his arms._

_"Against the terms," Blaine heard, and someone said, "he's not" and someone else said "you can't take him". Blaine couldn't think, his mind and body raw and exhausted._

_What had just happened? What had he—?_

_"Magic," Andrew seemed to answer him. _

_His mother looked heartbroken._

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><p><em>Heat and rage and embarrassment and humor and fear jealousy heartache happiness-terror-hilarity-giddiness-vindictiveness-upset-resentful-harp-violin-guitar-noise-noise-noise-noise-noise-noise-noise-noise—<em>

* * *

><p><em>Kurt, please, where are you, please!<em>

_He clung to the arms that came to encircle him._

_"_You always were so easy_," Andrew whispered in his ear, his voice suddenly coming to him as if through a broken radio. Blaine jerked back. "_I just have to say the word and you'll obey, don't I?"

_It was black and dark and Blaine growled and tore at the arms gripping him, marble, bronze, immovable. He elbowed, clawed, scratched, bit, and Andrew laughed, holding him closer, tighter. "_We're made for each other, beautiful, and the more you try to fight it, the more you'll prove it true."

"Fuck you,"_ Blaine snarled, molten violence bubbling up his bones. "_Let go! Let—" _He froze as he saw the body in front of him._

_He was dead. Lying in front of him on the floor, and he couldn't look away; his own dead body staring vacantly back at him, burnt out from the inside, eyes liquefied amber and bleeding out scalding rivers of burning Magic, sizzling the skin beneath it, open-mouthed and caught in the middle of a noiseless scream. Dead. Dead. He was dead, but still living, trapped in Andrew's arms and watching as his corpse decayed in front of him, Magic eating him through like acid and—_

_No, it wasn't him. It was **her**._

_And suddenly a surge of grief swallowed him whole, turning him boneless as water poured out his eyes, nose, mouth, filling him even as it emptied and it **hurt—so—much—**as she took the razor to her skin until it suddenly **cut off** and he couldn't feel anything and she was **gone**—_

A cry pushed its way out of his throat, and he collapsed against the arms holding him.

A cloud of someone else's _calm _enveloped him, overpowering in its clarity.

_Kurt._

"Shh," Kurt stroked his neck, and Blaine wept into his shoulder. "Shh." Blaine closed his eyes and swallowed thickly, willing himself to calm down. She was gone. It wasn't real. It had been a nightmare. He gulped down air, tried to slow his racing heart. Just a nightmare. Kurt's hand moved firmly up and down his back, sympathy pouring out of him and warming Blaine's skin. "You're all right," he said.

Blaine's heart plunged.

Oh.

Not Kurt.

Andrew.

Blaine let out a breath and slumped in defeat against the shoulder he had been crying into. Andrew's shoulder.

"That's it," Andrew said softly. "You can get through this. Just breathe."

Blaine slowly released his strangled grip on Andrew's shirt and let his arms fall. Heat crept up his neck and flushed through his blood. Andrew, not Kurt. This was his body.

"Someone just died."

"No," Andrew murmured. "No one's died, Blaine. You wouldn't be able to tell, not with me here."

Which was true: Blaine could feel Andrew so powerfully he couldn't get himself to focus on anyone else. Just like Kurt.

"…I felt it," he said blankly.

"You only think you did. No one died last time. No one's died this time."

Last time. Right. He had felt it last time, too. He had felt it so many times. But no one ever…

"I'm going mad," he breathed.

Andrew stilled. Then, he pressed his cheek against Blaine's. Cool. "You knew this was a side-effect," he said softly, lips brushing Blaine's cheekbone. "It's not permanent. You'll get through it."

Blaine breathed in sharply. He pulled back, placing a hand on Andrew's chest to lever himself up. Dazed, he walked away.

"I think I'm dying," he told Andrew as he walked. Nightmare images of his own corpse flashed in front of his eyes. He licked dry lips. "I think this is where I die."

A sharp needle of annoyance skid up his arm. "You're not dying," came Andrew's exasperated voice. "You're changing. There's a difference."

Blaine reached the bed, started tracing the wood-grain of the bed post with a numb finger. His arm tremored slightly as it moved. "I had another seizure today," he said, watching the minute shaking of his hand as he moved it. "I've had three this week."

Hands slithered around his waist, freezing, and he shivered, falling back against a strong chest. Andrew's calm flooded into him, soaking him in crashing waves of analytical fascination. Blaine tried to twist away, his head splitting open and his eyelids fluttering as Andrew held tighter.

"No, it's too hot for this," he rasped, fingers clawing at Andrew's skin. Andrew held fast.

"Don't you want the seizures to go away?"

"What?"

"The fever. Your body is still rejecting the emotion it takes in, that's why you're having seizures. It's building the fever to try to kill what it thinks are invaders."

He was shaking, he couldn't stop shaking. It felt like his skin was on fire. "Stop," he gasped as Andrew held him even closer. His head was _pounding_. "Fuck—get off of me."

"You need to accept this as a part of yourself. Stop thinking of this as some kind of attack. It'll stop the fever, and stop the seizures."

"Yeah," Blaine panted, beginning to feel lightheaded. "You know what else will stop the fever? Letting me have control over my own body. That would stop it real fast."

A knife of anger tore through his body, so strongly he jolted with it. "This is a part of you—you were made to take this and sustain yourself, you don't _need_ anything else. You just have to let yourself accept it!"

He couldn't think—he was _scalding_. "Get off," he prayed, no longer sure how to move his lips. "Get off, get off, get off, get off…" Irritation flared, enveloping him in spikes of fire.

"Jesus, stop _fighting_ this, Blaine!"

He lost his balance—was pushed?—and he felt something soft break his fall. The bed. He was on the bed. Blaine clutched at the sheets as Andrew grew mercifully dimmer, forcing himself to study the way the linen wrinkled, how it felt under his palm, what his shaking fingers felt like when he flexed them and how they curled back around the fabric again. _You. This is you. Anchor yourself._

A trickle of disgust slid over his mind.

"You're incredible," Andrew said lowly. "You were just fine with dying when that self-righteous little pretty boy was going to kill you. But now you think you're going to die here and you're freaking out."

"I chose that," Blaine glared at the sheets. "I didn't choose this."

"Bullshit," Andrew spat. "Of course you chose this: you _agreed_ to this!"

Blaine felt incredulous laughter bubble up in his throat. He pushed himself up, staring disbelievingly at Andrew. "I _ran away_," he said slowly. "That doesn't make you think I might have changed my mind?"

Andrew simmered, staying silent. Blaine huffed a delirious laugh and leaned back against the wall, closing his eyes.

"It's fine to be scared," Andrew finally spoke. "But this is going to do so much good for so many people. I know you see that. You saw it before."

Blaine slowly shook his head against the wall, baffled at how insanely twisted Wes' plan had made his life. _I've never seen that_, he wanted to say. "I see that it's breaking me down," he said instead to the red light of his eyelids. "I see that it's not going to work. And I'm going to die, stuck in a room with no door in a place I despise, filled to bursting with emotions that aren't mine. Just what I've always wanted."

Andrew's irritation pulsed through his blood.

"Well if you're determined to die, I may as well do you the favor of ensuring you have great company," he snarled. Blaine frowned. "Kurt Hummel's been getting a little to curious for my tastes—we're going to have to do something about that."

His eyes snapped open, a thrill of horror electrifying his veins. "_What?_" he gasped, pushing himself up off the bed. Andrew was already heading toward the door. "What does that mean? Andrew!"

Vindictive anger impaled him as Andrew stalked out the doorway. "You didn't think we'd leave a Fascinator like that all alone without a watch, did you?" was his only answer. Dread and terror and _rage_ filled him, and he tore after Andrew, slamming up against a powerful, invisible wall as he tried to get to him through the doorway.

"Don't! Don't you dare touch him!" he cried after Andrew's retreating figure. He slammed again against the invisible restraints, heart beating too fast and too hard in his throat as the clarity that came from Andrew's presence slipped insidiously from his fingers with every step Andrew took. "Don't fucking touch him, you bastard! _Andrew!_" Blaine lost his breath as a jumble of feelings punched into him like thousands of arrows, grabbing onto the doorway as his knees began to buckle. The dried herbs tickled against his hair, and he jerked back, stung, stumbling into the room and pressing his palms hard into his eyes as the sheer amount of emotion grew louder in his head. _Too hot too hot!_

"Shit," he hissed, unexpected tears choking his throat. Oh god, where was Sebastian? Where was Wes? He wanted out. He wanted out, somebody, please, get him out. _Please!_

He didn't want Kurt to die. He didn't want anyone to die.

_Oh god, please—he didn't want to die._


	7. Always Get A Receipt

_**Title: **Keeping the Balance_  
><strong>Author: <strong>sun_and_rain  
><strong>Rating:<strong> PG-13  
><strong>Warning: <strong>deals with issues of consent, homophobia, semi-sexual situations, and memory loss  
><strong>Summary:<strong> _No one recognized the name when Kurt first spoke it–a name he'd found buried somewhere in his dreams–but he couldn't shake the feeling that it was important: "Blaine". Whatever had been taken from them had something to do with Blaine._

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><p><strong><em>Chapter Summary: You can just feel the details. The bits and pieces you never bothered to put into words.<em>**

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><p><strong>AN: **I'm back in the real world! I am so sincerely sorry for the wait, Ladies and Gents. But I am now successfully moved, and I've got a fairly steady job, so I can finally get back to writing. Good news, though: we're only a chapter away from getting real, actual, concrete answers. I know, crazy, right? In the meantime, **visit here** (sunandrainfic. tumblr tagged/ left-over-headcannon) if you want to know any of my headcanon for this 'verse. Also, I've been collecting a playlist for the whole series that you can find **here**(sunandrainfic. tumblr tagged/ left-over-soundtrack). I've been adding to it sporadically. :)

Thank you all for the amazing support and for sticking with me! I'll do my best to reply to all of you now that I'm back on the wagon. And now: Here is (finally!) the latest chapter of Keeping the Balance.

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><p><strong>Chapter Six A: Always Get A Receipt<strong>

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><p>Kurt and Mercedes stood in silence in the empty choir room, looking at the wall and the chalkboard, respectively.<p>

Kurt cleared his throat, and shifted in his chair. Mercedes crossed her arms.

"So…" he said, drawing out the word like taffy. He watched her out of the corner of his eyes, fiddling with his fingers.

Mercedes' lips were tight.

"Sorry," she finally said, "I don't think I got what you were trying to do. Was that supposed to be your version of an apology?"

Kurt chanced to take a quick look at her expression. (_Yes, just as he thought: she was angry_.) Chewing on his lip, he tried to figure out the best way to answer that question without pissing her off more.

"…Yes?" he asked carefully, watching her eyebrows raise.

She tilted her head, as if waiting for him to say something else. Kurt let his lip fall out of his teeth, unsure what else he was supposed to say. He had been talking for the past ten minutes—there wasn't really anything to add.

Mercedes uncrossed her arms and then, huffing out a breath, crossed them again.

"So, this imaginary boy you see in your dreams, he told you to talk to Karofsky," she began, and Kurt opened his mouth to protest. "-and the only reason you're even talking to me right now is because he told you not to talk to him alone," she finished, holding up a hand to curb his speech. "Am I getting that right?"

Kurt clenched his jaw. "Not exactly," he began.

"And this past week," she interrupted, "the week where you were ignoring me and snapping at me and basically being a shit friend—that was because you were angry at me for doing something you _can't even explain to me,_ because you don't even know what it is I did exactly. But whatever I did, it had something to do with this imaginary boy who keeps coming to you in your dreams—and there's no way I would remember doing it because we've all had our memories wiped, so I just have to trust you when you say I did this horrible thing I don't remember doing. Am I good so far?"

"Mercedes—"

"And instead of _talking_ to me about all of this like a best friend _should_, you've been getting yourself sick because you're not eating, and you're sleeping too much, and you're not doing your work. And even though everyone in the choir room has been worried crazy about you since you got back from winter break, you've been so busy obsessing over this imaginary boy and acting like no one can tell you're not okay that you can't be bothered to get your head out of your ass and get some help. Did I get that part right?"

Kurt's heart thumped angrily in his throat as he tried to form words. "No—"

"No? So, you didn't ignore me every time I tried to sit down next to you?"

"That's not—!"

"What, you _haven't_ been oversleeping and skipping meals and not paying attention in class?"

"I'm not-!"

"And you just _tell_ me you need me to help you? You don't even say sorry for how you've been treating me? You don't even apologize for blaming me for something you don't even know if I did, all for some imaginary boy who—"

"He's not imaginary—!"

"_I know he's not imaginary!_" she exploded. The room echoed her words back to her.

Kurt stilled, feeling like he had been punched in the gut.

"…What?" A weird, twisted kind of hurt wrung his heart. Was she saying what he thought she was saying?

Mercedes looked like she was going to cry.

"You're not the only one who can feel that something's wrong, Kurt," she reproved, angry tears shimmering in her eyes. "Rachel hasn't come to school once without crying since we got back from break. Tina keeps remembering glee club practices that everyone else thinks never happened. Finn keeps looking behind you whenever you walk into the room, like he's waiting for someone else to follow you in." Kurt's insides slowly shrunk to nothing as Mercedes stared him down. He had noticed those things, of course, he just hadn't… he hadn't thought about them that way. "Whatever happened didn't just happen to _you_, Kurt," she continued. "It happened to all of us."

She took a trembling breath.

"I _know_ there's a boy. You wanna know how I know? Because I remember you coming to my house and crying about him. I just didn't think it was actually real until you came in here and started attacking me about it."

She huffed wetly and, as if someone had cut her strings, collapsed down into a seat.

"…I wasn't attacking you," Kurt protested quietly.

Mercedes sniffed and looked away, hugging her arms closer. "Yeah, well," she shrugged limply. "That's what it felt like."

Every organ inside of his body had tiptoed away. He blinked hard at the hollow aching their leaving left him with. It did nothing to make him feel better.

"Why didn't you tell me?" was all he could ask, voice small.

Mercedes sent him a watery look. "I would've," she said. "But every time I sat next to you, or even just tried to talk, you'd shut me out. You've shut everyone out. I don't know, I thought you'd actually want to talk to your best friend about something like this, but I guess I was wrong."

Kurt's throat was clogged with too much guilt. He swallowed it back, unsuccessfully, and then tried to breathe it out. Shakily, he took another breath and tried to speak. His voice clung to his throat stubbornly. Setting his jaw, he searched the ceiling for words.

"I was scared you'd think I was crazy," he finally said.

And then, letting his eyes fall back to the floor, he added: "and I… didn't want to share him."

Mercedes sniffed pathetically. Kurt didn't remember ever feeling as horrible.

"I'm sorry," his voice cracked, strained from holding back tears. "It's just… I've never had anyone fall in love with me before. I didn't think anyone _would_, not until a long time from now, but someone _is_, and he's this—this attractive, romantic, perfect dream boy that—I mean, he's not perfect, but—but he's in love with me, and—and I think I love him, too, I think I might be in love with him too, but someone took him away, and, and now I don't know if I do because I can't really remember—" Helplessness stuck to his words and they stuttered out of his mouth, everything that had been bothering him for the past week bucketing out of him like water out of a broken tap. "I feel like I _had_ something once, like I had some extra limb attached to me and someone's chopped it off and taken it away, and I _know_ what that sounds like, I _know_ I sound crazy, I, I don't even _know_ him, but you haven't seen him, Mercedes! He's in so much trouble, and I think he's dying, and he _loves_ me, and he needs me to help him and to remember all this stuff, but all I can remember is _stupid_things, like what m-movies we watched together, or how his eyes looked after I kissed him, or—or things that don't help him at _all_, and I _know_ we're running out of time, but I don't even know how I know that, or what happens when we do, or how—someone's going to die if I don't help him, and I'm so scared that it's going to be him, that the one guy who's ever loved me is going to die and I'm going to be left alone to live in a creepy old house with a million cats because I'll have lost the one boy who's ever loved me and I can't—"

Arms were suddenly encircling him and he was pulled into a fierce hug. He gasped and clung back. "I-I'm sorry, I didn't mean to keep talking like that, I'm sorry," he sobbed out through tears that refused to stop falling. "I meant to just apologize. I'm so sorry, Mercedes, I was horrible to you and I'm so sorry!"

"I know," Mercedes hushed, raining just as hard on his shoulder and holding him tighter. "I'm sorry for yelling at you. Thank you for apologizing. I just want my best friend back."

"You have him," Kurt pulled away to give her a watery smile. "I'm sorry. I promise I'll try to tell you things from now on. I wasn't thinking."

"It kind of sounds like you were thinking too _much_," Mercedes said weakly.

"I don't actually blame you for Blaine being taken away," he told her quickly. "I don't. It was just a stupid excuse for me not to tell you about him. I'm sorry for making you feel like I was attacking you."

"I'm sorry if I ever made you feel like you can't trust me enough to tell me things."

"I was just getting stupid and paranoid about everything—"

"And I'm sorry for not letting you talk—"

"No, I—!" they both started, and their voices in unison surprised a laugh out of them both.

Kurt breathed in and was relieved to find that it felt easy again.

"Kurt, you don't need to do everything by yourself," Mercedes told him quietly, expression raw. "I don't know what's going on, not really, and it sounds beyond scary… but of course I'm gonna help you with it. If you ever need help, boo, you just have to ask."

"I did ask," Kurt protested. "I needed you to come with me to talk to Karofsky."

"That's not what I mean," she said seriously. "I mean telling someone you're having trouble. You're not ever by yourself unless you wanna be."

Kurt met her eyes briefly, before looking away. Last year, it would have been easy to nod and agree and make promises for an elusive 'next time'.

But last year, he hadn't spent the majority of his time being tormented by a closeted jackass while everyone else went on with their lives, ignoring it.

"It's hard to believe that right now," he said.

Mercedes deflated. "You didn't tell me about Karofsky," she said. "You didn't tell any of the people that mattered: the glee club, your dad… You always try to handle things on your own."

"I've always found that's the only way I'm allowed to handle them," Kurt challenged, his heart beginning to rise up to his throat. Mercedes gave him a look.

"That's not true. I was there for you when you came out, wasn't I? And so was your dad, and so was Tina, and so was…_most_ of the glee club." A smile snuck onto his lips. Last year had been hard, but it had also been incredible. It had given him something he hadn't thought he'd ever receive, not at McKinley. And suddenly, there they were: friends. His dad. People who loved him for who he was. "And I don't remember too much about him, but I know that boy was there for you this year. It was one of the things you told me when you were crying." A vague memory of a confrontation in a hallway—in pastels and faded ink—came to the forefront of his mind.

"I'm jealous that you're so good at handling things on your own, Kurt," Mercedes continued, grabbing his hand. "Seriously, I'm beyond surprised sometimes at how much you can handle. But you can't do _everything_ by yourself. No one can handle all of that and still be okay afterwards."

Kurt chewed on the inside of his cheek, processing her words. "I don't know what you want me to say to that," he finally said.

Mercedes shook her head. "I don't want you to say anything," she said. "I just wanted you to know that."

He looked at her, truly, for what seemed like the first time in months. God, he'd missed her.

"And I also want to hug you again," she announced. A small laugh made its way out of his mouth.

"No arguments here," Kurt said, reaching out and holding tight as she followed through on her intentions.

He let out a hum as she hugged tighter, squeezing once before letting go.

"Okay!" she huffed out, brushing the wetness from underneath her eyes with a finger and standing up. Kurt followed suit delicately, sniffing back postscript tears. "Okay."

Curling her arm around Kurt's, Mercedes let out a shaky breath.

"Come on, let's go talk to Encino Man before we end up flooding the choir room."

"That would be unfortunate," Kurt said, stealing himself in preparation. They could do this. It would be fine.

And afterward, he would have a lot to think about.

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><p>Finding Karofsky was easier than Kurt had thought it would be. He and Mercedes had waited until lunch to start looking for him, and the first place they looked after they couldn't find him in the cafeteria (the gym), they found him. He was lifting weights, glancing around in that self-conscious, I'm-only-doing-this-in-case-someone-might-be-watching way that did nothing to stop the thrill of sudden fear that shot down to the base of Kurt's stomach. Squeezing Mercedes' hand painfully, he stopped, still a fair distance away.<p>

Shit. Shit, this was a bad idea.

Karofsky had told Kurt he would kill him if he told anyone. Kurt had forgotten about the death threat amidst all of the weirdness that Karofsky had been happily demonstrating during Glee club, but now... it was like a sign that had previously been turned off was loudly and abruptly revealed to him in bold, flashing lights: _Stop! Caution! Yield!_ This was a bad idea. He hadn't told Mercedes about Karofsky's Narnian status, but what if it looked that way? What if Karofsky assumed he _did_ tell, and decided to forgo the tea and biscuits and instead jumped straight to the Passion of the Lion-Christ scene, with Kurt as lion-Jesus and Mercedes doubling as the cute little girl and the little girl's sister, Karofsky playing all of the creatures in the forest who tore lion-Jesus apart for a very long and extended period of time? Why had he listened to Blaine? Why had he brought Mercedes? Why was he even _trying_ to talk to Karofsky?

Mercedes was clutching his hand, presumably in an attempt at being comforting, and Kurt tried to stop himself from shaking. She would be there for him. He could do this.

_— Blaine sobbed, shuddering in Kurt's arms. "Please, I don't want to go back—"_

He could do this.

He sucked up all of his terror and huffed it out of himself.

_He could do this._

Adjusting his grip on Mercedes' hand, Kurt closed his eyes briefly and started moving again. Mercedes gave his hand a squeeze.

"It'll be okay," she whispered. Kurt hoped so.

Karofsky caught sight of them before they could say anything. Startling, his grip on the weight he was using slipped, and it clattered to the floor as he whipped around to face them. "What are you doing here?!" he rushed, staring at Kurt as if _he_was the one who had threatened to kill somebody. Kurt's heart pounded against his ribs as he shook his head subtly with wide eyes, trying with all his might to get across to Karofsky that he _did not tell_ Mercedes. Please don't kill him.

Something panicked relaxed slightly in Karofsky's eyes. And, with it, something tense slipped off Kurt's shoulders.

"We wanted to ask you something," Kurt said, sounding much calmer than he actually felt. Mercedes' presence was a warm balm at his side.

"You've been looking at Kurt funny," she said. "We want to know what's up."

"I don't know what you losers are talking about." Karofsky looked strangely like a trapped animal, skittishly darting his eyes between Kurt and Mercedes and—the back wall? _Wait._

"Who are you looking for?" Kurt blurted, realization starting to tingle up his arms. "Are you looking for someone?"

"Can you just leave me alone?" Karofsky spit out, trying to shoulder past them. Mercedes stepped in front of him to block his way, gaze hard.

"We'll treat that the same way you treated Kurt when he asked you exactly the same thing," she told him icily. "Answer the question."

Karofsky clenched his jaw and, oddly enough, glanced at Kurt as if to ask for help.

"Blaine," Kurt prompted. "Do you recognize the name?"

Karofsky looked at Mercedes and then back at Kurt, brows furrowed. "Is this some kind of trick question?"

"No," Kurt assured him. "No, I just want to know."

Karofsky did a sweep around the gym, craning his head to look into the locker room before turning back to them. Shoving his hands in his pockets, he gave a defensive shrug. "Yeah," he said curtly. "What about him?"

"You remember him," Kurt said, awed. Why did Karofsky get to remember Blaine, and Kurt was left with fragments?

"Yeah. Whatever." Karofsky gave him a sullen look. "You told me he left."

Kurt blinked, drawing back in surprise. "I did?"

Karofsky avoided his eyes. "You were going to the nurse or something."

A memory curled into his mind like ink in water, spreading out to the corners of his mind. …_What are you doing? Are you waiting for Blaine?... _A vision of Blaine and Karofsky in the choir room wafted as smoke over his eyes, Blaine holding Karofsky's arm in a vice grip.

"You were meeting up with him," he said distantly, barely aware of Mercedes' surprised noise. Something very heavy settled over his brain, dark—a secret no one could tell him, an impossible, hopeless decision, just at the edges of his consciousness. _This is who you are..._

Karofsky shifted self-consciously. Shrugged again.

"Why?" Mercedes asked, flabbergasted. "What did you even talk about?"

"I don't think that's any of your business," he said gruffly. Mercedes frowned. Rolling his eyes, Karofsky glanced once more at Kurt before shoving his way past Mercedes and speeding to the locker room. Kurt's memories, still half-formed and intangible, began to slip through his fingers as water in a sieve.

"No, wait! Please!" Kurt called desperately. "Please, I need to know!"

Karofsky stopped.

Slumping with reluctance, he turned back around. "…Why do you need to know?" he asked guardedly.

Kurt stepped closer, letting go of Mercedes' hand for the first time since they'd entered the gym. "I need to find him," he told Karofsky, begging whatever forces of nature that were listening in on their conversation to help him get through his sincerity. "Please. He's been taken away. I need to get him back."

Karofsky's expression was inscrutable.

"You told me he was never coming back."

It was a punch to the chest.

"What?" Kurt gasped out, meeting Mercedes' eyes with mirroring wide ones. He whipped back around to Karofsky. "Why would I say that?" he demanded. Had he been involved in Blaine's kidnapping? Why would he have ever been involved in something like that?!

Karofsky shrugged.

"What did he say to you when you met up?" Kurt persisted. "Was there anything that stuck out?"

"It was nothing," he answered, hunching into his pockets. "It was just, like, personal stuff."

_Personal stuff? _ "He was helping you with—!" _finding your way out of the closet? _Kurt suddenly remembered Mercedes was in the room. "With—some things," he finished awkwardly.

Karofsky glanced at Mercedes. "Yeah."

Flashes of Blaine on the phone with Rachel. Of Blaine standing with him in the choir room and watching Karofsky with a weird, hard kind of sympathy. What had he been doing to them? Why was he talking to them?

"Did he say _anything_ about leaving?" Kurt almost begged. "Anything about what to do if he left?"

Karofsky shook his head. "You're the one that told me he was leaving."

But Kurt couldn't _remember_ anything! He was going to cry.

"Please, just… that day in the hallway, when I was going to the nurse. Just, can you tell me what happened? Why was I going to the nurse?"

Karofsky looked at him with a mixture of uneasy confusion and pity. "Dude, you were there."

"I don't remember," Kurt breathed.

Karofsky breathed a heavy sigh through his nose and glanced around the gym again. "You were all weirded out, like on drugs or something. I don't know," he said reluctantly. "You, like, couldn't walk very well. I just asked if you needed to go to the nurse, and you told me that Blaine wasn't ever coming back."

As Karofsky talked, Kurt's memory filled in with details. He remembered the feel of the brick wall against his face. The strange haziness, the heat, and the crippling, painful _thirst_. The feel of Blaine's hands, cool, soothing, against his scalp. And it hovered, a heavy shadow over all of it: the reason _why._ The key to all of what had happened.

"Are we done?" Karofsky interrupted.

Kurt must have been silent too long, because Mercedes answered, coming up to link her arm in his. "Yeah, we're done," she said, sounding a little defeated. "Thanks for answering our questions and not defaulting to your usual state of perpetual douche-bag."

"…Thanks," Kurt mimicked as an afterthought, letting Mercedes lead them out of the gym. He was close, he could feel it. Blaine was taken away, but getting him back had something to do with what he'd been doing to Kurt. Or what… what Kurt had been doing to Blaine? He flashed on a slanted memory of two beautiful words, carved frighteningly into his brain: _soul mates_. He didn't know why, but the term sent a chill through his veins. _You're just fascinating, aren't you?_ An argument with Blaine in a girl's bathroom. A sense hopelessness, or dread, or…

They were almost out the door when Karofsky called out.

"Kurt!"

Kurt stopped moving as if he had forgotten how.

Karofsky had never called him by his first name before.

Feeling off-balance and alarmed, he turned to meet Karofsky's gaze.

"I'm sorry," Karofsky said quietly. It punctured through Kurt's chest, shattering part of some glass casing he'd built a long time ago. "I'm—I'm really sorry about everything I did to you. It was messed up."

Kurt's eyes were wide and filmed wet from not blinking. Something strangled in his throat. He couldn't speak.

Phantom fingers caressed his own for the briefest of seconds. _Blaine…_

"Yes," the words came out deliberately. "It was."

Mercedes squeezed his hand.

Swallowing, Kurt turned his back on David Karofsky, and left the gym.


	8. Remember Sammy Jankis

_**Title: **__Keeping the Balance_ (6b/9?)**  
>Author: <strong>sun_and_rain**  
>Rating: <strong>PG-13**  
>Warning: <strong>deals with issues of consent, homophobia, and memory loss**  
>Summary: <strong>_No one recognized the name when Kurt first spoke it–a name he'd found buried somewhere in his dreams–but he couldn't shake the feeling that it was important: "Blaine". Whatever had been taken from them had something to do with Blaine._

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><p><strong>Chapter Summary:<strong> Kurt and Mercedes try Rachel. Things begin to fall into place.

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><p><strong>AN: **I am so sincerely sorry for the wait, and so absolutely humbled by all of your continued faith in me. Really, it's taken forever to write this chapter, and your sweet words and understanding have been more than I ever expected. Thank you so much for all your love, you are all incredible. Finally, finally, finally, here is the second half of the chapter. I hope you enjoy it! Things are going to get crazy town next chapter.

Quick reminder since it's been so long:

-Headcanon asks and comments are on my tumblr under the tag** left over headcannon**

-soundtrack for the whole series is on my tumblr under **left over soundtrack**

-you can track my writing with the **sun writes things sometimes** and you can track this specific story with the tag **left over: keeping the balance**

That's it! Can't wait to see what you think! This chapter was difficult.

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><p><strong>Chapter Six B: Remember Sammy Jankis<strong>

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><p>"<em>You told me he was never coming back,"<em> Karofsky's words echoed in his head as the TV flickered colors in front of him. Kurt couldn't make himself pay attention to who Bachelorette Lindsay was going on a date with. His mind was spinning with countless impossible fabrications.

Why would he have told Karofsky that Blaine wasn't coming back? Had he been involved somehow?

He must have. He must have been involved with the people who took Blaine away. Or he must have been told that Blaine was going to be taken, and had been trying to prevent it from happening. Maybe he had dreamt it. Maybe he had planned to hide Blaine away from the rest of the world until his kidnappers left them alone. Maybe he had organized the entire plot with Mercedes, making a deal: Blaine for their lives.

_(Kurt…_ Blaine whispered soft in his ear.)

Had he really been involved? Had Kurt let Blaine be taken? It was too disturbing a thought to dwell on, but he couldn't shake the dread creeping its fingers over his heart. How else would he have known Blaine was never coming back?

_(Kurt, _came the voice again, urgent and muffled.)

And then there was that shadow hovering like a dark raincloud just above his reach. '_You're just fascinating, aren't you?' _The memory of an unbearable thirst. A painful need that consumed his thoughts. The lingering shiver of something horrible prickling his skin. There was something about the role he played in all of this that—

_**KURT!**_Blaine _screamed_, voice tearing as it shot like lightning through his body and Kurt leapt back against the couch as a phantom with molten gold for eyes and claws for fingers lunged for him—his head splitting open and something too hot shooting through his chest—

"Kurt?" Mercedes asked softly.

Kurt gasped raggedly and the nightmare was gone. Clutching at his chest, he felt his heart drumming fast and hard against his hand, his head pounding faintly in echo of it.

Mercedes gently touched his arm. "What is it, boo?"

Kurt looked from her to the empty space where the phantom had been. It was gone. He grasped at his calm, scouring the room in front of him for a clue to where it had disappeared to. He shook his head violently, breathing fast.

"You didn't see that?" he demanded.

Mercedes frowned. "See what?"

Kurt didn't know how to answer. He shook his head and closed his eyes, pressing his free palm to his forehead as his blood began to slow to a manageable rate.

"Nothing," he finally muttered. "Just… nerves." He blew out a shaking breath and loosened his grip on his shirt, letting both his hands drop.

Mercedes watched him closely. "We'll go to Rachel again tomorrow. She has to know something that Karofsky isn't telling us. We'll see her, Kurt."

He nodded silently. After a while, Mercedes turned back to the TV. Kurt let his head fall on the arm rest of the couch, shifting down to get comfortable. His heart thumped loudly in his ears.

_(Kurt…. _the monster with the gold eyes whispered.)

He squeezed his eyes shut and pretended he couldn't hear it.

* * *

><p><em>It was empty. No one was there.<em>

"_Blaine?" Kurt called._

_Emptiness threw his voice back at him. Kurt's skin prickled at the stillness._

_Suddenly, Blaine flashed past him—moving erratically, belatedly, like he couldn't quite get a handle on his body. His eyes were molten gold and useless, stuck still in his face like he'd forgotten their purpose. Kurt jumped back as he was brushed by, recoiling from the horrible, bastardized puppet of the boy he loved. This wasn't Blaine. This was animalistic, raw, feral. Kurt fought the fear threatening to choke him. This couldn't be Blaine. It couldn't be, not yet!_

"_Please, hold on," he said through hopeless tears. "I'm coming. I promise, I'm coming to you! Please, please..."_

_Blaine disappeared: __**flickered**__ once, right in front of his eyes, and was gone. Panic clawed out of Kurt's chest. "BLAINE!"_

_Arms grabbed at him quickly, turned him around. Kurt shrieked—and then collapsed in relief. _

_Blaine as he was, as Kurt knew him before the start of the nightmare, stood exhausted and worried in front of him. His edges were blurring, and his hands shaking, but he was there—he was Blaine. Kurt clung to him as he searched Kurt's face intently._

"_What is it?" he asked, voice so sweet Kurt ached with it. Kurt kissed him desperately instead of answering, shaking his head and clutching at his arms when Blaine tried to pull away._

"_Kurt—hey, it's okay. It's okay, calm down—"_

"_You have to wait for me," Kurt begged, grasping at Blaine's shoulders, his neck, his hair. "I have Mercedes with me, now, and she's going to help. We're going to talk to Rachel and we're going to find you. You have to hang in there and wait for me!"_

"_I will," Blaine assured him. "I'm fine, Kurt, we're __**fine**__. I can wait. It's okay, I can wait for you." He brought a hand up to cup Kurt's face._

_Except that it didn't come up the way a normal hand would. It jerked to the side—as if he couldn't quite control where it was going—before resting stiffly on Kurt's cheek._

_Kurt's heart stopped. _

_Blaine lids fell closed in slow resignation._

_Kurt could do nothing but stare. Then, firmly, Kurt reached up and grasped the offending hand in his own, lacing their fingers together. Tightly. He kept a careful eye on Blaine as he held his hand, covering their clasped hands with his other. They didn't speak. _

_Blaine's hand twitched uncontrollably in his._

_There was nothing either of them could say._

* * *

><p>He hadn't brought cookies this time. He had been too unnerved when he woke up to bake anything that morning, so there were no cookies.<p>

After their talk with Karofsky had yielded nothing of substance, they had gone straight to Rachel's house yesterday. When they arrived, though, they found the same blockade of parents that had prevented Kurt from seeing her the last time he'd tried. No matter how much pleading Kurt and Mercedes did, the Mr.'s Berry would only promise to pass on the message. Their drooping shoulders and disappointed faces were then kindly escorted out the door. It was only after Kurt's minor freak-out in front of the Bachelorette that Mercedes suggested they skip class the next day to try to see her.

"We can get to her when her parents are at work," she said. "She's gotta know something. Why would she be so upset otherwise?"

She had suggested it for him, Kurt knew. If he hadn't been jumpier than usual lately, she probably wouldn't have wanted to skip school to pursue Rachel at all. Kurt appreciated the unrelenting optimism; his was running on low. Nights with Blaine were getting increasingly alarming—Blaine would forget words, spend hours staring into nothing, and sometimes move as if he was surrounded by an ocean of water. Most startling, he'd started to _flicker_ like an image from a broken TV set. Kurt didn't know what it all meant, but he was terrified it had something to do with Blaine's insistence that someone was going to die if they didn't fix things. Kurt didn't know what he would do if he had to go through losing Blaine after spending all this time trying to remember him.

Everything had begun to seem hopeless and inevitable. But it couldn't be. He couldn't let himself think that. Rachel would see them because she had to see them—because there was no other option but for her to see them. Kurt would accept nothing less.

Which was why he was currently climbing up the trellis of her house, hoping that she wasn't the kind of person that took to locking her windows during the day.

"Is she even in her room?" Mercedes called up to him from her spot beneath the trellis. "If the front door is locked…"

"I'll let you know when I get into her room," Kurt hissed back. "Keep your voice down, someone will hear us!"

But it was too late—someone had already heard them, and their plan was blown before it was even properly begun. Kurt looked up to find the next open hand-hold on the trellis, and found himself face to face with one Rachel Berry, who had popped up behind the window. He almost slipped in surprise, clinging tightly to the wood and vines covering the house.

"Rachel!" he cried out in reflex. "Oh! We—"

"What are you doing?" She interrupted him angrily. Besides the obviously dark circles under her eyes, she looked exactly like the Rachel he had sat with a few months ago. "Did you come to make fun of me for being a crazy freak who has to be homeschooled?"

"What?" She was being homeschooled? "No!"

"Did Finn send you?" Vulnerability laced through her expression, and Kurt wondered again what was going on between her and his step-brother.

"Finn doesn't even know we're here," Kurt was quick to assure her. "Rachel, I just want to talk to you."

"So you decide to break into my house? Quinn says you've been asking about me in Glee club. I don't have anything to say to you." She was a stone wall. "Go home, Kurt."

"Mercedes is here, too," He protested lamely, as if that would somehow change her mind. He gripped the trellis he was still clinging to, fighting frustration. This was quickly spiraling out of his control.

Rachel leaned out the window to see Mercedes staring up at them. "Mercedes, take Kurt and go home. I don't want to talk to you."

"Just give us a few minutes!" Kurt was beginning to remember why he and Rachel were not friends. They couldn't waste time like this—for all Kurt knew, Blaine could be dying as they were having this conversation. "We need to talk!"

"I don't want to talk."

"You can't hide away forever," Kurt pressed, frustration tensing his shoulders. "We can help you!"

"I don't need your help."

"_God_, Rachel, stop being so _stubborn!_" he exploded. "Just let us in! Not everything is about you! Sometimes people have _actual problems_ that they need to deal with, and you know what they do? _They deal with them_. They don't just lock themselves in their room and refuse their friends when they come asking for their help! This is serious! Would you just take a second and think of someone other than yourself for _one minute_?"

"Kurt!" came Mercedes' voice. "Stop."

Kurt looked down at her in surprise before glancing back up at Rachel.

Oh. Shit.

Rachel's eyes were red and glazed with the tears that had already begun tracking down her cheeks. Her lips trembled as they pressed into a hard line. _Shit._

"Get off of my house," she said, voice low and graveled over.

"Rachel—" he began quietly. Her hands shot up to slam her window shut. "No, wait—!" He moved to try to stop her, but the _bang_ of the window hitting the sill stopped him in his tracks, echoing finitely in his ears. The drapes closed.

Kurt was going to cry. Angrily, he hit his hand against the side of the house, bowing his head against the trellis. That was stupid, that had been so _stupid_. He looked back down at Mercedes helplessly.

"Get your ass down here," she said angrily, arms crossed. "What the hell was that? I thought you wanted her to let us in!"

"I don't know! I panicked!" He made his way carefully down the trellis, wanting to kick himself. "I'm just stressed!"

"So you take it out on the girl who's been bursting into tears all month? Good idea."

"I need to find him. He doesn't have a lot of time left," Kurt told her urgently.

"Well you aren't gonna find him like that," Mercedes snapped at him. Kurt jumped down from the bottom of the trellis, running a frustrated hand down his clothes and cursing under his breath. Mercedes watched him.

"I'm doing the talking from now on," she told him firmly. "That was terrible. I don't know what is up with you lately, but I will gag you if I have to next time. No one is going to talk to us if you keep attacking them like that." Kurt swallowed, avoiding her eyes and nodding.

She sighed. Arms came around him to pull him into a tight hug. "We'll find him," Mercedes' muttered in his ear. "Just take a breath and stop pushing people away. They'll help us if we let them. I promise we'll find him, Kurt." It was so much like the promises Kurt himself had given Blaine that he couldn't quite take it to heart. He squeezed her to him in thanks, anyway.

"I know," he whispered. He wasn't sure how convincing he was.

Mercedes gave him one last returning squeeze before letting him go. "Okay! Take two," she announced, straightening up. "We're using the door this time."

If Kurt's laugh sounded more like a sob, neither of them acknowledged it.

* * *

><p>Two hours later, they were back. This time with cookies.<p>

Rachel peeked out of the window next to the doorway the fourth time they rang the bell. Kurt caught her eye and mutely held up the plate of cookies, pleading as much as he could with his eyes to give him a second chance. She glanced between him and the plate for several seconds, and then disappeared from view.

They had been standing for so long Kurt was ready to give up when the front door suddenly clicked. Rachel opened the door a sliver, just wide enough to fit her body in the space its opening created. She said nothing as she stood there; simply waited. Mercedes was supposed to do the talking, but Kurt wanted to try to clear to air a little first.

"I know they aren't the famous Rachel Berry 'I'm Sorry' cookies," he began tentatively. "But I did my best with what I had to work with." Dark eyes still a little puffy from crying studied the baked goods. "…They're vegan?" he offered, raising his shoulders in a slight shrug.

Rachel sucked in her bottom lip. "Thank you," she said quietly.

"Can we come in?" Mercedes' matched her volume. "I promise Kurt won't yell at you again. We agreed that I'm going to do the talking this time."

Rachel shook her head. "I don't really think that's a good idea," she said. "I'm just going to end up crying."

"Why?" Kurt blurted. Mercedes slapped him in the arm, keeping her attention on Rachel.

"Why do you think you're going to cry?" She rephrased for him. Kurt bit his tongue. Patience: something he had absolutely none of today.

Rachel took a shaking breath, shaking her head with forced nonchalance.

"Rachel, we think we can help you. I know we're not best friends, but we've grown a little bit closer this year, don't you think? You can tell us. We won't make fun of you."

Rachel glanced around them, as if expecting to see the rest of the New Directions crouching behind their backs. When she was satisfied there were no contortionists hidden behind them, she spoke up. "I have nightmares," she finally said. All of Kurt's focus narrowed in on her. "They're just dreams, but they affect me more than they would other people. I'm very sensitive."

"Are we in them?" Mercedes asked her carefully.

Rachel gave a lingering look towards Kurt before glancing back at Mercedes. Realization dawned over him.

Kurt had always had a problem with keeping his mouth shut. The entire football team hadn't been able to get him to shut up; he didn't know why he thought he'd be able to succeed where twenty bull-headed bullies had failed. So he wasn't surprised when the words slipped out: "You know what happened to us."

Rachel's eyes widened and she moved backwards to close the door.

"Wait! We remember him, too!" His hand shot out to stop the door from closing. His lips wouldn't stop forming words, his panic and excitement driving them to tumble out of his mouth. A lead, finally, a _lead! _"We all remember him in some way—he's been taken from us, we just don't know how. Don't, please, _don't_ close the door on this, we—_I_ have dreams, too!"

She froze at the admission, staring at him with watery eyes. "You dream about him, too?" she asked. Kurt nodded quickly.

She gave a shaking gasp. "I'm going to hug you," she warned, and suddenly she was doing exactly that, tackling into him with more force than Kurt had expected from such a tiny body. Kurt looked wildly at Mercedes for help, but Mercedes only shrugged back at him. "So much for me doing all the talking," she muttered. Kurt cautiously patted Rachel on the back.

"I thought I was the only one!" she cried into his shirt. "Every time I looked at one of you guys, or I entered the choir room, I saw it, and it was horrible. I can't go to school anymore. He wanted me to go to school and keep an eye on you, but I just can't!"

Kurt's ears perked up at her last admission. "'He wanted you to?'" he repeated.

"He visits you?" Mercedes asked.

Rachel pulled back, finally, wiping her eyes and nodding. "He tried, once. I dreamt about him a few days into winter break, and he tried to tell me something in my dream." Kurt's heart was racing. Did Rachel remember more of what Blaine told her than he did? Why was Blaine visiting _Rachel_ of all people? Did she know where he was? "I don't think he realized what he was doing until I asked him who he was and what he was doing in my dream. He asked me if I was okay, and he knew my name. Then he said something else, but I couldn't remember it when I woke up."

"You've only dreamt about him once?"

It seemed that once she had resolved to talk about it, Rachel was entirely devoted to telling them everything (and doing it properly). She took the plate of cookies out of Kurt's hand and set them down on the coffee table, and then disappeared into the kitchen.

"Then I started having the nightmares. I can hear him sometimes, when I'm awake," she called to them from the other room. "He's not there all the time, but he lets me know when he is. He keeps telling me to go back to school, but he doesn't know what I see there."

She came out with a pitcher of lemonade in one hand and three glasses balanced in the other. Kurt and Mercedes rushed forward to help her.

"Sorry, I haven't had many guests," she fussed as they set the glasses around the table, pouring the lemonade. "I'd offer you milk with these, but I don't think either of you are big on Almond Milk."

Mercedes wrinkled her nose. "Not really."

"I thought so," Rachel nodded.

"Can I ask…" Kurt began as they all sat down. "What do you see when you go to school, or when you look at us?"

Rachel busied herself with straightening the cookie plate. "I don't really want to talk about it."

Kurt bit down hard on his lip before he said anything thoughtless and glanced toward Mercedes. She nodded imperceptibly. "You know we won't make fun of you," she prompted Rachel. "We're just trying to figure this all out."

Rachel nodded, but didn't look up. "I know," she said. "I know you think you want to hear it. But I don't think you do. I think you'll be upset once you do."

"Why?" Mercedes asked.

"Quinn was," Rachel answered. "I had to stop telling her."

The brief brush of fingers against his own was all the warning Kurt had before a voice suddenly spoke within his mind—clearer than it had ever been before. _Take her to the choir room. Trust me._

…Blaine. Warmth blossomed from his chest, rosy and wonderful. Oh, thank god. He was still okay. He was here, actually here with Kurt, and he wasn't dying. They still had time.

Rachel was studying him with a small smile on her face. "He just spoke to you, didn't he?" she asked. A mix of relief and tenderness painted her features. "You hear him, too."

Mercedes looked at Kurt in surprise, and Kurt felt like someone had suddenly lifted a pair of colored glasses from his eyes. Something intensely kind and longing hovered around Rachel's form. His heart swelled at the image. Was this what Blaine had seen that first day he'd met her? It hit him suddenly that she knew. Maybe not to the extent that he did, but she _knew_ and remembered Blaine as more than just a forgotten idea.

Was it her presence that made Blaine's voice so clear to him? What role did she have to play in all this?

_She's the amplifier_, Blaine whispered.

The answer shocked over his skin and then settled like a calm wind. The amplifier. She did have a role. Blaine had a _plan_. He was helping them find him even as he was stuck deteriorating who-knew-where. This wasn't entirely hopeless.

Mercedes was right: he wasn't alone.

"He says to take you to the choir room," he told her.

Rachel frowned. "No, I'm not doing that," she said firmly. "Sorry, but that's not going to happen."

"Rachel," Kurt said, leaning forward earnestly. "He's right. Maybe it'll hurt to tell us, but we've all been hurt by this. It hurts everyone more not to know what's going on. As Mercedes has had to remind me"—he glanced toward her ruefully—"sometimes it's easier to get things done when you have some help carrying the load."

Rachel looked unconvinced.

"We want to get him back," he said firmly. "He's in trouble. He was taken away, and the only way we'll be able to fix what went wrong is if we know what happened. I think that's what you've been dreaming about, haven't you?"

"…Yes," Rachel admitted hesitantly. "But Quinn—"

"Quinn's not okay, Rachel," Mercedes came in. "_No one's_ okay. They just don't understand why. Everyone remembers something, we just don't know how it fits together. If you can help us make everything fit, maybe we can start to figure out how to be okay again."

Rachel swallowed, toying with her glass. "Finn remembers, too?" she asked quietly.

Kurt searched her eyes. "…He remembers something," he said slowly.

Rachel chewed her lip, glancing between them. Glancing down, her eyes unfocused slightly. She seemed to be having a conversation with herself. (_No_, Kurt realized, _with Blaine_.)

"If you can… then, yes. I do," she nodded decisively. Kurt wondered if she knew that neither he nor Mercedes were aware of what Blaine had just said to her. Getting up, she brushed her (hideous, but Kurt had been trying to avoid thinking of her clothing all day and he wasn't about to ruin things now by saying something stupid) skirt off and straightened her shoulders.

"You're right: I need to face this. Everyone needs to know. And he needs to come home." Kurt didn't know who she was performing for, but he didn't call her on it—if this was the way to get her to help, he wasn't going to stop her. "I'm clearly the only woman for the job, the one missing piece in all of this. I'll do it. I'll—" she faltered slightly, then sniffed, puffing up proudly. "I'll do it."

Kurt was so relieved he didn't even warn her before he tackled her into a hug. Mercedes grabbed her after, thanking her profusely, and Kurt was reminded that he wasn't the only one invested in this.

_Keep a hold of me,_ Blaine murmured in his ear. _This is going to be difficult._

Kurt breathed in as Blaine's presence seemed to surround him.

_We're about to do some magic._


	9. Now Turn Red To Tempt Snow White

_**Title: **__Keeping the Balance_ (6b/9?)**  
>Author: <strong>sun_and_rain**  
>Rating: <strong>PG-13**  
>Warning: <strong>deals with issues of consent, homophobia, and memory loss**  
>Summary: <strong>_No one recognized the name when Kurt first spoke it–a name he'd found buried somewhere in his dreams–but he couldn't shake the feeling that it was important: "Blaine". Whatever had been taken from them had something to do with Blaine._

* * *

><p><strong>Chapter Summary:<strong> Blaine has plans. Sebastian wants to know them.

* * *

><p><strong>AN:** Gasp.Is that a KtB chapter posted sooner than four months from the last? And it's a Blaine chapter! I was going to go straight to Kurt again with this one, but I think a few things needed to be seen before I could continue with Kurt's story. So, with that in mind-here it is! Hope you enjoy! As always, your reviews and comments are greatly appreciated. Thank you all for sharing your thoughts!

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><p><strong>Chapter Seven: Now Turn Red to Tempt Snow White<strong>

* * *

><p>The wood grain beneath the pads of his fingertips was smooth and cool. Logically, he knew it was a few degrees colder than room temperature. He knew he had a high fever, and that it should feel like ice against his skin. It should feel rougher. It should feel immediate, present, because it was right there in front of him, not miles away. He was awake. He was alive. He was in his body. He should be able to feel the grain that made up the doorway.<p>

He couldn't.

He rested his head against the wooden frame, closing his eyes. His fingers carefully traveled up the material, stroking slowly up and down. _These are your fingers. These are your fingers. Feel the wood and prove it. _He breathed slowly, focusing all his attention. (Or—some of his attention.) _Feel the wood._

Voices cried out for him in his head, calling his name. Over and over and over. Kurt, Rachel, his mother, a little girl from middle school who kept dying over and over and—

Wood grain. The door. _This is your body. These are your fingers. Feel the door._

Nothing. Just sound. From downstairs; from Lima, Ohio; from a house he'd forgotten the location of. Sound, noise, people saying words, people speaking to him, people feeling feeling feeling things. _The door. Feel the door. Feel_—emotions loud in his ears, plans loud in his mind, and everybody crying out help, help us, help me, help, and eventually it would all swell and spike and suddenly cut off as it always did, and someone would die—again—in a middle school bathroom a foot from his desk, bleeding out onto the floor, over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and—

_Stop_.

No. He had to think. Focus.

He pulled out of himself a little more.

He breathed. Opened his eyes. He looked at the wood.

He dragged his fingers. Slow. Careful. He watched their progression, saw them trail past lines that spoke of thousands of years of history. Wood, used to be bark. Used to be a tree, like the tree in Kurt's backyard—hiding secrets and doorways into other places, other worlds. Then it was cut and re-made into something someone could use, its body stripped and burned away.

He would die before he was used. Not again. He would kill himself. Like the girl in middle school, bleeding out onto the floor, everything swelling once before cutting off for the last time. He still had the right to choose, the capacity to think and make decisions. He still had his mind, even if his body was slowly disintegrating into uselessness. Despite what Andrew thought, he still had options.

He dug his nails into the doorframe. (Nothing.)

He still had options.

Something steadily grew in his chest, interrupting his thoughts: a foreign body he vaguely recognized. He filled with relief as it turned up the volume, spreading out into the room. _Thank god. Finally._

"Where have you been?" he asked, toying with the edge of the doorframe. "I needed you."

Silence greeted him. He paused, a sharp dip of fear plunging down his chest. …There _was_ someone there, wasn't there? His brain told him to turn around and check, but he was frozen still. _No; he wasn't that far gone. Was he?_

"…What are you doing?" asked a quiet voice.

He fell limp in relief, rabbit's heart slowing in his throat. His fear came out heavy through his mouth, and he tried to calm himself. "Inventory," he responded. Then, softer: "Don't do that to me."

"Do what?"

"I thought…" his eyes squeezed hard. _It can drown you, his mother answered him years ago. You can't let yourself rely on it, or you'll lose yourself._ "…Never mind." Licking his lips, he turned around. Plans. His eyes zeroed on the empty hands in front of him. "You didn't bring the counteragent," he noticed.

Sebastian's eyes bore into him. "Amsugnol is the only thing that can counteract those herbs," he said flatly.

_And?_ His lifted eyebrow implied. "Yes," he agreed. "You didn't bring it."

Sebastian's disturbance played cellos in his ears. "Amsugnol is poison to you," he said.

He pushed off the doorway and made his way to the bed. "Did Wes tell you that?"

"No one sees Wes except David."

He sat down on the mattress, sending Sebastian a hard look. "Did Wes tell you that?" he repeated firmly.

Sebastian ground his teeth together. "…Yes," he admitted. Hope feathered a light flute's melody. "Is that why you told me to find something for the herbs? So I would meet Wes?"

"No," he traced the weave of the blanket underneath him. "I wanted the amsugnol."

"_Why_?" the question burst out of Sebastian's lips. "Do you want to die?"

"Yes." He looked up and met the other boy's shocked face. His eyes narrowed as he studied the music Sebastian was playing him: unease. Betrayal. "Didn't they tell you?" He tilted his head curiously. "I thought everybody knew. I'm a loose cannon. Unstable. Can't make my own decisions."

"Don't play with me. You know I don't think that. You seem to have forgotten that I'm here to _help_ you."

He smiled at Sebastian softly. "If you were here to help me, you would have brought me the amsugnol."

Sebastian breathed sharply, tensing against the urge to hit something (he knew, because the urge sang loudly in his ears). "I hate to bring him up," he said through his teeth. "But what about that boy… _Kurt_? You're just going to die with him?"

The smile stayed on. "It wouldn't be the ideal solution, no."

Speaking of Kurt… a brief, questing tendril caressed his brain, searching for reassurance. He closed his eyes, focusing. _The choir room._ He breathed it out of himself, sending it toward Kurt's grasping fingers.

"The amsugnol is Plan B," he chanted, tilting his jaw and weaving knowledge into the patterns of Kurt's mind. With his mind opened like that, downstairs seeped its fogging smoke of music notes into his pores. His fingers played the keys on top of the blanket underneath him. Percussion and strings and voices crowded his mind, tempting him with siren songs. _Listen. Listen_. They were ugly-beautiful, irresistible. A tide ebbing into him and threatening to pull him out of himself as it hooked around his heart and tugged. So easy to get lost in it.

"What's wrong with you?" the words came to him from far away. "You're… different."

"Am I scaring you?" he breathed out, a strange euphoria creeping over him. "I can't tell if that's you or someone else."

"Where are you?" Sebastian's voice was low, insistent. "It's like you're only half here."

Someone called his name, panic swelling around the curves of the words. Kurt, dreaming again? No: Rachel.

"Lima, Ohio," his voice used his lips to answer.

_Courage_, he sent her, trying for beautiful letters and calming lines. They were so close. He could hear it—tonal shifts in their song. They were so close to where he needed them to be.

"Look at me," said the far-away voice. It threaded into the swell of the orchestra. "Blaine. _Look at me_."

**_Look at me, _**_the voice inside of his body stretched out. **Give me your eyes. I can take care of you. **It grasped at him with claws for hands. **Open your eyes. Look at me. **_

_Blaine was floating, sinking…_"They are open," _he whispered_.

A hand grabbed his wrist, and desperate anger flooded into him from the contact. "_Come back!_" someone whipped into his skin. Demanding—_commanding._

Blaine jerked as the strings snapped and he was forced back into stark awareness. His eyes shocked open, his nerves electrified, stinging like fire all at once, all over his body, shuddering through his muscles like millions of swords slashing through him. "No—_stop_ _it!_" He wrenched his arm from Sebastian's grip, flinching away from him. Pain assaulted him, everywhere pain, and he choked on it. Shaking, he brought his palms up to dig into his forehead. His head _throbbed_. "Why did you do that?" he cried, pressing hard into his temples.

"Are you _kidding_ me? Where the fuck were you just now?"

"What?" Blaine gasped out.

"You were _gone_, Blaine, I called you to look at me for like ten minutes, and you were _gone!"_ Sebastian's panic sliced into his head like knives, clouding him from formulating a response.

"Stop it," he breathed, flinching. "Stop."

"You can't keep running away."

"It's not running," he snarled. "Kurt is my anchor."

"How was that at all anchoring for you?!" Sebastian exclaimed incredulously. "What the hell do you think you're doing to yourself?"

"Stop. No. You—stop." Blaine shot up off the bed, pacing the length of the room. Walls closed tight around him, cutting off his air. "You commanded me. You just commanded me."

Sebastian faltered. "I didn't know what else to do—"

"You _don't_," Blaine snapped, feeling his muscles tense, his balance fall, his mind shut down. "You _don't_ do that. You _never_ do that, do you understand? You _never_ do that!"

"Okay!" Sebastian held up his hands in surrender. "I'm sorry, I didn't know how else to bring you back!"

"You _never_—!" A thick sludge of _loud_ engulfed him and he gasped down a breath. It hurt. It hurt. It _hurt! _His muscles quaked and he _forced_ them to stay open as his body tried to curl in on itself, fingers spasming apart. Release. Release. Leave, god, just go away, shut up, get out of his head out of his veins his heart out out out out _jesus god it hurt it was too much too much loud loud loud out get out release release leave please please please out out out out out out—_he tried to shout, tried to scream, bent in half and retched dryly but nothing escaped him.

"I can't think like this," he huffed. "I can't _do_ anything like this!"

"You couldn't _feel _the way you were," Sebastian pointed out carefully. "I thought the point was _not_ to lose yourself."

Blaine swallowed convulsively, shook his head, still shaking, shivering. "I need to be able to think," he said helplessly. "I have to. They need me."

"You're playing right into Erickson's hands," Sebastian interrupted. "You know that, right?"

Blaine trembled as the words settled in his brain. _He… what?_

His body ached. An overpowering temptation to pull away, pull back, coaxed at the edges of his consciousness. Pull back how far? **_I can take care of you_**, echoed the voice of a monster buried deep inside of him.

Oh, god. Legs weak, he slid resignedly to the floor.

He couldn't do this.

"…It hurts," he panted, breathing too hard and fighting tears. "It hurts too much. I can't." Exhaustion tied weights around his limbs. He couldn't move.

Sebastian watched him with unreadable eyes. "It's either some pain, or insanity. Your choice, killer."

Bitterness rose within him, and silent laughter shook his body. "That's not much of a choice." His eyes closed of their own volition. Voices cried out, but he couldn't hear them, understand them. It was too hot. He was too raw. It hurt too much. "This feels like insanity."

Fingers slid down his hand. (When did Sebastian move so close?) "Do you need me to take away some of the heat?"

Blaine dropped his head forward. _Too much._ "No," he bit out. "It'll only come back again. I need to…" he trailed off as too many people swelled downstairs, pricking his nerves and splintering through his bones and cutting off his thought. He bit his tongue as it tremored through him.

Something snapped within him.

_I need to think!_

He pulled away.

Everything suddenly paled to pastels, and someone turned the sound down. _Yes, this is better._ Softer, clearer, clinical. It was like diving underwater. Cool ocean submerged him, and he felt his body relax, his lungs expand in relief. **_Yes_**_, a voice whispered within him._ Energy skittered through him. Electric.

"What are you—No!" Sebastian's fingers on his arm had lost their temperature, but they kept enough of their weight that he could still tell they were there. "You can't run from this; lose feeling and you lose yourself!"

"You _have_ been talking to Wes," he smiled as he focused on seeking out the threads he'd dropped earlier. A horn piped Sebastian's frustration, but he brushed it off. "I can't function without this." Cracking his eyes open, he glanced at Sebastian wryly. "Didn't you say it was 'my choice'?"

Sebastian stared back at him for a long while.

"…Fuck," he finally muttered, letting go of his arm. "Fuck you."

"I think that's Andrew's ultimate plan, yeah," he shot back, standing up. He stretched out, imagining his limbs were sore. Symphonies and conversations began in his head as he settled back into the ether of not-quite-his-body, music wafting over his skin. "Speaking of, you should probably go before he comes up here. Next time you visit, bring me amsugnol."

"No. I'm not going to kill you," Sebastian protested.

_Hilarity pressed itself into his mind. _Uncontrollable, hysterical laughter danced out of his mouth.

"Oh my god, of course you aren't!" He turned around to look at Sebastian, and it was like he was seeing him through new eyes. The image prompted a wild, otherworldly amusement. "You humans, you think you can do anything," he grinned breathlessly. "_Please_. You couldn't kill me if you tried!"

Sebastian looked at him, disturbed. (_He could hear it._) "Come back," he said warily. "You're not yourself."

"You're frightened of me," he noticed. "Bring me back the amsugnol, and you'll see me as myself." His gaze slid off into neverland as Lima rang loudly in his ears. (Rachel again, drawing in him in as a moth to a flame—not even realizing what she was summoning.) "You should leave before Andrew catches you," he continued absently, soothing her fears with half his attention.

"He won't be coming up today," came Sebastian's reply. "He's not even at Dalton."

It took a second for the words to register.

When they did, Blaine's insides froze.

"..._What?_" he asked on air. "Why did he leave?"

"I don't know."

"Where is he?" he snapped, urgency stealing into his calm.

"No one knows, he just left."

"No. No." Andrew's threats rang out in his thoughts as dread overtook him. His mind raced down the strings leading to Kurt, panic rushing bubbles up his lungs. "How long has he been gone?!" he demanded. "Where was he last seen?"

"I don't know, a few days ago? Why? What is it?"

"No. No, no, no, he can't, he can't!" Words tumbled out of his mouth as he tried desperately to establish a connection, to find an image of Kurt somewhere in his mind. The safety of the ether dissolved around him as he slid back into the physical world, frantic terror hammering his heart too hard, his blood too fast, forcing him to acknowledge the tissue and bone he was stuck in. Kurt was blocked from him. Gone. "No, no, no, no!"

His fingers came up to claw off his skin, tug himself out of the prison cell serving as his body so he could fly, scour the world, when strong hands gripped his wrists, stopping him. "What is it?" Sebastian was close, too close, trapping him in. "Stop freaking out, just, what's going on?"

"He's going to kill him!" Blaine latched onto Sebastian's neck, digging his fingers into the skin. "He's going to kill him, and I can't help him, I can't—!"

"—Who, Andrew? Andrew's going to kill who?"

"Kurt, it's Kurt, you have to help him, please!"

"Your Fascinator?" Sebastian was alarmed, confused, and useless. "Isn't he dying anyway?"

"No, he can't—you don't understand, he—Kurt is my _anchor_, please—" Sentences, thoughts, he couldn't form them—just an all-consuming terror, a certainty that everything would be lost, ruined, he'd be gone, _one big swell of noise that suddenly cut off _and left him blank, drowning, black, _dead, dead, dead, dead_—"He's my anchor, you have to save him—"

"I don't know what that means!" Sebastian cried. "You say that all the time, and I don't know what it means!"

"He has to live, or I _die!_ Everything's over and I die—_Magic_ dies!" The truth spilled out of him like blood from an open wound, and he bled, helpless to staunch the flow.

Sebastian drained of color, disbelief in his eyes. "What are you talking about?" he demanded.

"He's—my Fascinator," Blaine tried to explain helplessly. "You have to help."

"What did you do to him?"

"I didn't, I— I love him, I gave him—myself. All of myself." He didn't know how else to explain it, lost for words or feeling.

Hurt; jealousy; yearning: they shuffled in Sebastian's eyes for quick seconds, even quicker static shocks of them sparking from Sebastian's fingers into Blaine's skin. Blaine jerked back as the other boy pulled away from his grip.

His lips parted as realization hit him, sketching itself over the room. He watched, stunned, as Sebastian swallowed back his envy. "Sebastian…" he began softly.

"He dies, you die," Sebastian interrupted roughly. "That's what you're telling me?"

Blaine let him get away with changing the subject, wrong-footed at his sudden understanding of the other boy's feelings. "…He's part of the cycle. If Andrew breaks it..."

"So he can live, but _you_ die either way. Either he _kills_ you, or youdie when he does. Am I getting this right?" _Not quite_, Blaine thought but did not say. It didn't matter, anyway. What mattered was saving Kurt.

"He has to live. I gave him a part of myself, if he can just _get_ to me—or if I die before he does—!" Blaine began.

"I'm not helping you kill yourself," Sebastian said shortly. "Not happening."

Blaine clenched his jaw tightly.

"Does Andrew know this?" Sebastian asked.

"No."

"Does Kurt know?"

Blaine avoided Sebastian's eyes. "No," he admitted. "I… it was a last-minute thing. Right before Andrew took me from him. I—didn't really know what I was doing. It was more instinct than anything else."

"It was instinct to ensure that no matter what happens, you die," Sebastian said flatly.

Blaine stared at him in challenge. "No one is going to use me," he said quietly. "It was Plan B."

"Your Plan Bs are pretty fucked up, killer. What the hell is Plan A?"

Blaine avoided answering. "Save Kurt," he pleaded. "Please. Go to Lima and save him. I can't release any Magic, I can't cast anything. It's stuck inside me, it's driving me insane, I can't _reach_ him, please, I can't warn him, and I can't stop Andrew. Please. Please, save him, _please_, he has to live."

"_Kurt_ is Plan A," Sebastian said, something ugly and disbelieving in his tone.

"_Please_, Sebastian." Hot tears burned behind the bridge of his nose. "He has to live."

Sebastian stared at him, searching for something in his face (Blaine didn't know what).

Then:

"Jesus Christ." He ran a hand through his hair distractedly. "The things I do for you. Fuck."

Blaine almost collapsed. "Thank you, god, thank you," he nearly sobbed in relief.

"If I'm doing this, you have to stop hiding from the real world. You have to stay awake and in your body until I come back."

"Deal," he agreed immediately.

"I don't even know how to get there," Sebastian muttered.

"Wes will know, Flint found the doorway twice," he rushed. "Andrew must have used it since."

Sebastian started sprinting to the door. "I'll have to get to Wes, then." He passed under the herbs and through the doorway before something stopped him. Blaine watched as he stilled, then turned slowly back around to face him.

"This was your plan, wasn't it?" Sebastian accused. "To get me to go to Lima."

"We don't have time to talk anymore. Please, Sebastian, I don't know how much time he has," Blaine replied intently.

Sebastian stared. He leaned angrily into the doorway. "If there is _any_ scenario that ends with you living at the end of this nightmare? I'm taking it," he threatened. "If you're hiding something from me..."

His eyes pierced through Blaine—who only stood silent, defiant, offering no answer. Sebastian set his jaw. Then, finally, he turned and disappeared down the hallway.

Blaine waited a few minutes, tensely, as Sebastian's footprints faded away. Pain began to creep into the edges of his vision. He breathed out, trying to adjust and sliding slowly back into full awareness. His senses prickled, feeling coming back to his muscles as he woke up. _Stay in the physical world_.

Then: A sudden, sharp cry, and a swell of emotion.

_Kurt!_

Blaine gasped. So _clear_, like he was screaming into his ears—help, crying for _help_—

He didn't even stop to think as his eyes slipped shut, breaking the promise he'd just made only minutes earlier. _Kurt, hold on, I'm here!—_

Pulling away from his body and searching for Kurt's signature, a voice whispered from inside his heart: **_I can take care of you._**

Claws, reaching, grasping, crawling up his neck. Threads leading him to Lima, pulling, beckoning, screaming, and he followed.

**_Give me your eyes._**

He slid into the waiting darkness.

**_Yes._**

He was so far away he couldn't even feel it as his body buckled—collapsing to the ground like a puppet whose strings had just been cut.


	10. The Red Pill

_**Title: **__Keeping the Balance_ (7/10)**  
>Author: <strong>sun_and_rain**  
>Rating: <strong>PG-13**  
>Warning: <strong>deals with issues of consent, homophobia, and memory loss**  
>Summary: <strong>_No one recognized the name when Kurt first spoke it–a name he'd found buried somewhere in his dreams–but he couldn't shake the feeling that it was important: "Blaine". Whatever had been taken from them had something to do with Blaine._

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><p><strong>Chapter Summary:<strong> Kurt, Rachel, and Mercedes try to get through to the glee club. Certain things go to plan. Others don't.

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><p><strong>AN: **Once again, I remain humbled by all of your sweet words and continued loyalty to me. You are incredible for still reading such a silly little story. So here's an extra-long chapter in recompense! On that note: you know how I said we were going to crazy town? **This chapter is crazy town.** No kidding. This part gets very, very dark. Check out **Blinding by Florence and the Machine** ( /watch?v=ZQjx9ZiVQvY) for this chappie.

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><p><strong>Chapter Seven: The Red Pill<strong>

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><p>Kurt lightly scanned the room, skipping over Santana's crude whiteboard drawings and the game of hackeysack Puck and Sam were playing next to Artie. They had been in the choir room for about ten minutes, give or take, and those ten minutes had so far been spent in utter awkwardness. No one said anything (not even Santana), and yet everyone kept sending him suspicious glances, superbly failing at trying to pretend they weren't looking at them. Quinn was the only one bold enough to outright stare. He felt her gaze lift up the hairs at the back of his neck.<p>

Rachel, sitting in the seat next to him, strangled his hand. Mercedes sat on Rachel's other side, providing silent support.

He hadn't thought this through.

_How do we even know this is going to work?_ He thought helplessly. _Blaine: do you actually have a plan?_

As had become the norm since waking this morning, Blaine remained silent in answer. He hoped he and Rachel weren't expected to do this without help. Neither of them had any Magic in them. It would be a pointless exercise without it.

The bell had rung a few minutes ago, signaling the end of school, and Kurt glanced back at the door again as Tina and Mike danced their way in.

Tina caught sight of Rachel first, and she opened her mouth to say something-when Mike saw her too and squeezed Tina's hand. Tina's mouth snapped close. Kurt sent both of them a thankful look.

They were the last people in the club to arrive. Kurt waited a few more minutes, making sure Karofsky kept his promise.

He and Mercedes had cornered a few people throughout the day. They found the jock in the locker room a few minutes before school had let out, and asked him to keep the rest of his team away from the choir room for the day. (They didn't need to involve anyone that wasn't already affected). Karofsky had given them a searching look before agreeing to tell his teammates that Glee was canceled. They were only a week out from the big halftime performance, so it wasn't the greatest lie to tell, but Karofsky had assured them that the team would swallow any excuse to take a break from their relentless schedule of training and rehearsing.

It was strange, but Kurt had forgotten all about the game coming up in the wake of everything that was happening with Blaine. The rest of the world seemed faded and unimportant compared to the danger threatening over his head. He supposed that Karofsky must have talked to the football players since his apology in the locker room, because he didn't remember being heckled at all this week. In fact, the jocks all seemed to be much more receptive to Mr. Schue and the rest of the glee club—even going so far as to be enthusiastic about the upcoming performance. It should have been surprising that his mortal high school enemies were cooperating happily with him—or at the very least heartening—but it barely registered as important.

It was funny how he had lived through the past month of high school the same as he had any other, and yet recalling its events seemed as disaffecting as recalling the events of a book he'd read.

It had been ten minutes since the bell rang. Everyone was here. Karofsky had kept to his word. The rest of the glee club had started to get curious about why they hadn't started yet.

He supposed now was as good a time as any.

Clearing his throat, he slipped his hand from Rachel's grip and stood up by the piano.

"Kurt?" Finn asked curiously. The room immediately quieted. (His friends were really bad at acting normal.)

"Finn," Kurt acknowledged. He braced himself. "I asked Mr. Schue if we could take today just for ourselves. To do some team-building. So it's just us today."

The room filled immediately with dissenters.

"Are you kidding?!" Tina exclaimed.

"Don't we have a performance in like a week?" Santana pointed out bluntly. "Why's Berry here? I thought she was getting comfy in a padded room."

"I'd rather get some of those dance moves down than kumbaya with you guys, no offense," Puck added. "I don't wanna look like a douchebag out there next Friday."

"Quiet, let me finish!" Kurt interrupted. "This is important!"

Santana rolled her eyes and raised her hands in surrender. Puck shrugged. Kurt saw Quinn out of the corner of his eye, watching him intently. He swallowed.

"Listen," he started quietly. "We need to talk about what's going on. This entire month has been weird, and I know you all know it. There's something missing. Something's been taken from us. I've seen you guys trying to figure it out by yourselves."

His friends stirred. Brittany nodded sagely, and Kurt found himself wondering how much she knew. She grabbed Santana's hand, who was shifting awkwardly in her seat, and turned to look specifically at Quinn (who had a slight wrinkle of worry in her stone expression).

Tina looked around at everyone warily.

"So it's not just me?" she asked softly. Mike took her hand.

Kurt found himself locking eyes with Finn. And it struck him, once more, how much they had all isolated themselves because of this.

Kurt had seen Finn struggling with his re-written memories. He had watched as he'd grown steadily more helpless and angry as Rachel refused to come to school; as Karofsky hassled them both in glee club; as Finn himself kept looking for someone he couldn't even remember had existed. Finn had been involved in this from the beginning: he had been the first person to help Kurt after Kurt had found Blaine, and had grown to be good friends with Blaine in the time the other boy had been with them. Finn was his family….

And Kurt hadn't even thought to talk to him about any of this.

He had been so wrapped up in his own problems that he hadn't even noticed how his silence was allowing so many others to continue hurting. Like Mercedes. Like Tina, Mike, whatever Brittany knew, and that look in Santana's eyes. Like Quinn, and Puck. Like Rachel.

This wasn't a one-time thing. This wasn't snapping at someone out of stress and baking them food in apology. This wasn't a fight he regretted when sitting by a bed in the hospital. This was a _pattern of thinking _he had fallen into.

One he had to break out of, if he ever wanted to stop hurting the people he loved.

"You're not going crazy," he told Finn's eyes softly. "There's really something wrong. You just don't remember what it is."

He glanced around at the hopeful and scared faces of his friends.

"Rachel _does_," he announced to them. "She's been avoiding us because she thinks she's the only one who remembers. But I think, if we could listen to her, we might remember, too."

That was Rachel's cue. He looked at her, but she shook her head slightly, her eyes wide. Kurt, frustrated, turned to Mercedes—who started gesturing none-too-subtly for Rachel to get up. Quinn watched them, alarmed.

"She can't say it," Kurt continued as Mercedes and Rachel finally made their way up to meet him. "But we thought… if she could sing it… we might understand."

The room was uncharacteristically silent, and tense. No one said anything—not even Quinn. Kurt took a breath and nodded to Rachel.

Then, sitting down at the piano… started playing.

'_Get them to resonate at the same frequency,' Blaine prompted as Kurt sat on Rachel's couch. _

_Kurt blanked. '...What?'_

'_Make them feel what you're feeling,' the presence inside of him explained. 'Make them realize there's something missing. Parts of their minds are locked from them—make them notice it. Make them force open the lock.'_

_Feel what he was feeling. Did Blaine mean by magic? 'How are we supposed to do that? Should I concentrate really hard or something?'_

_A tickle of humor ran across his cheeks. Blaine didn't answer him in words, though. Instead, a memory surfaced, feathering across his mind gently: Tina sat on a stool, singing an Ingrid Michaelson song. Kurt was crying without knowing he was crying. When he looked over, he saw Rachel in the same condition. He blinked and looked back at Tina—who had tears swimming in her eyes. _

_Suddenly, he understood. Oh. Make them feel._

Music prickled his skin. Rachel began singing.

"Seems that I have been held in some dreaming state… A tourist in the waking world—never quite awake."

Her voice had threaded through it a strange power: it was weird, atmospheric… magical. It haunted the air, pressed down on his bones. Felt more like she was opening him up and reading his contents aloud like a book than singing a song.

He glanced at the rest of the choir room. _Make them feel._

"No kiss, no gentle word, can wake me from this slumber," Rachel continued quietly. "Until I realized—_**that it was you who held me under**__—_"

And suddenly, _there_, the room _shifted_—changed—her voice was everywhere, heavy, shifting, reshaping—

"_**Felt it in my fists—In my feet—In the hollows of my eyelids—"**_

He did. _They_ did—a tingling, an electricity in the air, waking up forgotten nerves someone had put in storage. His hands, his toes, _the hollows of his eyelids…_

"_**Shaking through my skull—Through my spine—And down through my ribs—"**_

She was narrating their present—their bodies following almost simultaneously to copy her words. She spoke, and it happened to them. Magic. _Blaine,_ Kurt thought dizzily.

She went into the chorus, and the air sparked around them. Kurt and Mercedes joined in as back up, like they were enchanted. Power thrummed through his veins and he felt it join the song—the _spell_, for that's what it had to be, a spell—through his voice. He caught a glimpse of Finn—enraptured, staring at Rachel like it was impossible to look away. And Quinn—eyes already welling up, seeing something in front of her no one else could see. Puck, a small frown on his face. Santana, her lips pressed into a thin line. Tina, hands to her mouth, Mike gripping her arm. All of them, staring at the images the others couldn't see.

"_**No more dreaming like a girl—so in love, so in love—no more dreaming like a girl—so in love, so in love—no more dreaming like a girl," **_Rachel was chanting, the words drilling into Kurt's head. He turned back to the piano, and then—

"_**So in love with the wrong world."**_

A breath in the music, and the world froze. _Blaine_—there he was, standing right across from him, at the opposite end of the piano. Real,_ living_, in full Technicolor and 3-D, right across from him. They locked eyes, Blaine's an eternity of amber, and—

Kurt fell in.

* * *

><p><strong>all around the world was waking I never could go back<strong>

Images tumbled around him, out of order.

"_Who are you?"_

_"You see, I've run away. And I'm afraid I can't go back."_

_this was not at all how Peter Callaghan acted when__**he**__ woke up_

_"__**What**__am I? That's a more appropriate question, I think."_

**all the walls of dreaming they were torn wide open**

_Kurt shifted closer. Thought __**please**__. __Thought __**must**__. Thought __**want**__.__ He watched as it echoed in Blaine's eyes… felt it tear at his throat…_

_"You're already screaming. All the time. You're screaming. I think you've been screaming for so long you don't even hear yourself anymore. But you don't need me to show you how to do it."_

…_like a magnet had snapped his attention into place._

_Blaine, outside the door. He had wanted to come to school with him._

_"Let me in!"_

_Blaine could help him…_

**no more dreaming of the dead**

_"And I remember __**screaming**__, and everyone was looking at me, but I told them she was in the bathroom."_

… _He glanced around the table, at faces that had been stressed, tense, and edgy only last month—now glowing with contentment. Finn, Carole, his dad. Blaine. For the first time since the prospect of the new marriage, Kurt felt like he was part of a family._

_His family._

_"I felt it the minute I saw you. But I couldn't tell if it was you or me. Or even if it was… me or the magic__. __And then it kept getting more intense, like I couldn't be happy until I was near you, and… I didn't know who I __**was**__, anymore. I couldn't control my body. I've never… you do something to me, to __**it**__, and sometimes it feels like I've got a separate creature inside me. There's me, Blaine, and then there's… "_

**for a boy for a body in the garden**

_Kurt's stomach flipped and he felt his breath hitch. Oh crap. __**There.**_

_There it was. There was the form. There __**had**__ been a form outside. It was underneath the oak tree. It was crumpled underneath the oak tree and it wasn't moving._

_"You feel so deeply, Kurt. I think you underestimate how powerful that is. I don't think you believe anyone can hear you, but you're the clearest thing I've been able to hear since I got here."_

_It slammed into him like a crashing tidal wave. Everything in him stretched in thirst with a suddenness and intensity that scared him, and he found himself pulling with greedy invisible fingers at the well of fire hiding inside of the boy beneath him—except he didn't have to pull at all, it was rushing into him like some kind of niagara of blazes, igniting inside of him and—_

_"It's always me, even when it feels like it isn't."_

_in a language he couldn't read, but he could feel_

_**so in love so in love**_

_"Do I get a magic wand?"_

_"You get a Blaine. I hope that's not too disappointing."_

_"Were you going to tell me? Or was I just going to kill you and wake up in the morning with a dead body in my bed?"_

**synapse slipping through the hidden door**

_"Hey, Blaine? Who was the one who helped you build walls the first time?"_

_the word 'soul mate' floating tantalizingly in his mind's eye, with trailing strings of love and trust and forever following its afterimage like ghostly petals_

_he was going to throw up_

_"Don't—" open the door—_

**Synapse slipping through the hidden—**

* * *

><p>"Door," Rachel, Kurt, and Mercedes finished, and Kurt was thrown <em>starkly<em> into the real world. He stumbled, hand falling onto a discordant chord on the piano.

The room jumped, jerking awake. Mercedes looked at him, eyes spooked. The room was tense, cold—Blaine, his presence and his magic, was gone.

"What _was_ that?" a breath finally broke the silence.

The room exploded with noise.

"Did you see—?"

"Kurt, did you know those guys?!"

"Oh my god, what just happened?"

"Was Blaine _magical_? Like, fairy-tale-lord-of-the-rings _magical_, seriously?"

"I knew it, I knew we were missing—"

"No but really, that was _trippy_, like, fucked-up trippy. Are you guys for real? What did you slip in the cafeteria food?"

"How did you _do_ that?"

"How could we have forgotten a whole _person?_"

"Where is he now? Kurt?"

"Kurt?"

"_**Kurt…**__"_

Kurt shook his head, feeling weirdly light-headed.

"Kurt? Are you okay?"

"Kurt!"

Mercedes shook him. "Kurt, are you okay?" she repeated.

Kurt blinked rapidly, trying to bring her into focus. For some reason, he kept seeing Tina overlaid on top of her. _'Maybe you should go to the nurse.'_

"I'm fine," he told Tina. Mercedes. "I just, I need—I need some air. I need to get some air. I'll be fine. I'll be right back. I'm just… I'll be right back." He was too stuffed full. He got up from the piano, reality floating, shifting, around him.

"I'll be right back," he repeated blindly as he left the choir room.

It was cold. He didn't remember walking out of the school. Was he outside?

_slipping through the hidden door… slipping through… someone's slipping… go back inside, Kurt, someone's…_

The air sharpened itself against his skin as he walked, trance-like. Ghostly images overlaid themselves overtop the world in front of his eyes. "_**Kurt…**__"_ it whispered to him. He was in the choir room. No, he was outside. He was just outside the school, clinging to the railing while he made his way down the steps, as if blind. Blaine was with him, holding his hand so tightly.

_Kurt,_ someone called, voice muffled and echoing inside of the caverns of Kurt's head. Blaine? Too cold. It was too cold out here. _Kurt, stop!_

"_**Where are you?**__"_ the cold asked him. Kurt didn't know. Outside. _I'm outside…_ Wasn't he supposed to be going to the choir room? His head hurt.

"_**Come find me**__,"_ said the cold, mischievous and mocking. His legs weren't working. Kurt placed his hand against the hallway walls and pushed against them as he stumbled his way to the choir room. He was too hot. No. Too cold. His head was throbbing, and his body was aching—Karofsky had told him he'd said Blaine wasn't ever coming back. He remembered. He remembered saying it—he had just said it, a few minutes ago, he—

'_You're just fascinating, aren't you?'_ His eyes couldn't adjust, too many realities shining headlights into his irises. He was in the girl's bathroom with Blaine. He was stumbling against the brick wall of the school building. He was standing in the hallway outside of the choir room, with someone who had brown eyes and a feral smile. "_**Come on, I want to talk to you.**__"_ Kurt gasped as he jerked away, fell against something—it was brick, rough against his hands, he was outside, he was outdoors—his mind overstuffed with multiplying images, knowledge crowding his head. '_I don't want __**you**__ to die! Kurt—!' Someone's looking for you—'The magic, it's, it's like a drug, and your body can't function without'—I think it has something to do with Blaine—'You must be Kurt'—_

He grabbed at his head, trying to slow everything down. Kurt squeezed his eyes shut, leaning heavily against the brick wall. _Run! Get out of there! _someone screamed at him, but the sound was distorted and too far away.

The pain passed as quickly as it came, and his lids slipped open to find intense brown eyes staring back at him.

His entire body froze.

Brown eyes. They were real. The brick against his back was real. He'd somehow slipped into the alleyway between the school and the football field in his fevered haze. This was real. It was getting dark, he was in an alley, and a boy was watching him.

"You were in my head," the words exited his mouth before he thought to give them leave.

"In your ear," the boy in front of him corrected, dark amusement coloring his gaze. The world doubled, and Kurt and the boy were in two places at once. Kurt watched outside of himself as a copy of the boy in the choir room was super-imposed over the one in front of him, the two speaking at the same time. "Blaine's the only one—"

"—_who can get into your head_," Kurt mouthed along with them. His eyes widened as _knowledge_ crept its tendrils over his brain.

"Andrew," he remembered.

Andrew's answering smile was a shark's grin. "That was faster than I thought you'd be," he commented. "Good. I want you to remember everything."

"What do you mean?" A flashing image of Blaine, wrecked and dying on the ground, cut through his voice. Kurt flinched violently. A nightmare. "Remember everything," he repeated numbly, trying and failing to look away from the outline of Blaine's dead body. "Blaine," his voice came out soft and breath-painted. "Did you to something to him? Why do you want—? What are you doing to him?"

Andrew was as vigilant as a hawk, eyes gleaming in the gathering dusk. "Don't worry. You'll remember."

_He could feel Blaine so clearly next to him, like a gaping wound in his mind…_

"You're a Fascinator." He didn't know what the phrase meant. And then suddenly he did. "_I'm_ a Fascinator." His head was pounding, and Kurt had to lean all of his weight against the wall. He couldn't keep his balance. It was too hot. "What are you doing to _me?_" he gasped out as phantom fingers caressed his scalp. Remembered fingers from a time he'd lost—was gaining back.

"I'm not doing anything," Andrew protested happily. Kurt supposed it was true: he was still only standing there and watching. "_You're_ unblocking yourself. When was the last time you ate?"

Kurt couldn't remember.

"We've been lacing your food with amsugnol. But that's not going to do much if you're not eating it, is it?" _Amsugnol._ The word sparked a hazy memory from a dream. Someone had spoken to him while he was asleep: _It's a numbing agent. Fascinators used to take it for pain._

"My friends tell me it's been a few weeks since you had a proper meal. And if your body begins to remember, it won't be long before your mind follows its example. You're doing this to yourself."

'_Kurt, please, don't do this to yourself.'_

"_You_ took Blaine," Kurt gasped out, and as he said it, he could see it happening. _'NO, NOT HIM! PLEASE! HE'LL DIE, YOU CAN'T, PLEASE, NOT HIM—'_ "Where is he?"

"He hasn't told you?" There was something new and dark in Andrew's voice. "Don't you guys have little mind pow-wows every night?"

"Mind…?" _Blaine flickered out of existence in front of his eyes._ Chills raced up his arms and dread dropped into his stomach. "No," he said, locking eyes with the boy in front of him. "He _can't_ tell me. You know he can't, you told him not to."

"Did I?"

"You're doing something to him," Kurt growled, sick of Andrew's darkly playful evasions. "He's losing—he's losing himself. Every time I see him, he's more… not himself. What are you _doing_?"

"Setting him free," two Andrews answered him. Kurt blinked hard, trying to erase the overlapping image of the past. His sight blurred.

"What does that even mean?" he asked, frustration burning behind his eyes. "Stop answering me in riddles!"

"It means he's learning how to let go of his body. He doesn't need it."

"Let go of his—?!" Kurt remembered the fuzzy, terrified look in Blaine's eyes in his dreams; the odd stumbling, and half-aborted movements. "Are you kidding me? You're killing him!"

"No," Andrew countered vehemently. "We're helping him." His face was alight with a restless passion that crept up Kurt's spine like crawling insects.

"You're insane," he said warily. "He doesn't want any of this. He never wanted it."

"Blaine doesn't know what he wants," Andrew shrugged. His expression shifted, something calculating entering his voice. "That's why I'm here. To help him realize what he wants."

A jolt of fear shot lightning down Kurt's spine, forcing a harsh clarity to come over him as he realized what Andrew meant. _'Help' him._

Those utter bastards.

A wave of anger rose fast and uncontrolled within him. No. _He had no right._ Where did he get the right to treat people the way he did? Where did Dalton get the right to ruin others' lives the way they've ruined Kurt's, and Rachel's, and Mercedes' on a whim? How was that 'helping' anyone?!

His family was torn and distant to each other because no one could remember anything of the time when they hadn't been. Rachel hadn't gone a day without nightmares. His friends had all witnessed a horror that no one could properly remember, and so no one knew how to deal with their feelings about it. Dalton had torn his life apart—had torn _Blaine's_ life apart—they had all been so happy, and Dalton had meddled with everyone where they had _no right_ to meddle, and it had to _stop! _

He pushed himself away from the wall, venom fueling his movements.

"You won't help anybody," he spat, gathering strength. "You've hurt my friends. You've hurt my family. You've tampered with our lives, our minds, and you can't get away with that! I'm going to find him, and I'm going to take him far away from you, and then I'm going to come back and hurt you for what you've done to us!"

Andrew laughed, loud and bright and shocking. His hand pressed against Kurt's chest and forced him back against the wall. "Is that what you're going to do?" he chuckled, face much too close to Kurt's own. His breath tickled Kurt's cheeks and Kurt flinched away, his head banging painfully against the brick. "How exactly do you plan to do that? You don't even know what you're doing right now!"

His blood throbbed. "Why, what am I doing?" he asked. Tears pricked his eyes, frustrated and pain-filled. It _hurt_. Why did it hurt so much?

(_Run! Kurt, run! _a muffled voice clamored inside his head. '_Blaine's the only one who can get into your head.')_

_What am I doing?_

His eyes grew wide with shock as the answer came barreling through his mind.

"_**Dying."**_ He said it as Blaine said it as Andrew said it. All of them, past and present within his mind. The syllables echoed deep in the caverns of his body, repeated in three, six voices, shaking his core with the undeniable truth. What he'd been forgetting—the piece of the puzzle he'd been missing all this time… what Blaine couldn't tell him.

A matter of life and death.

_His _life, and_ his _death.

He was dying. _He was dying—!_

"Won't leave you much time to find him and enact your oh-so-threatening revenge." Andrew was still laughing, boyish and breathless with amusement. Kurt couldn't speak. "Good luck with that." As if on cue, Kurt's head split open. One last wall in his mind: dissolved. He cried out as residual pain and a horrible kind of _longing_ sliced down his limbs. (_Kurt!_)

"He's not yours." Andrew continued, unimpressed. "Blaine doesn't belong to you, Kurt. He belongs with Dalton. He belongs with me. He's _mine_. And you can whine and scream about it all you want, it's not going to change the fact that—"

Andrew suddenly cut off. Kurt swallowed as he watched Andrew's expression shutter closed, focused on something just below Kurt's neck. Slowly, he followed Andrew's gaze to see what it had landed on.

_ve you_

Written in golden, flowing script, it peeked out from its place below his breastbone, just above his shirt.

Kurt's heart leapt to his throat. It beat there erratically as Andrew's lips parted, his fingers slowly inching up and curling around the material of Kurt's collar. The collar pulled down. The rest of the script revealed itself.

_I love you_

It sat defiantly on his skin amid several others like it, sweeping into spaces hidden by the rest of his shirt.

Andrew was very still.

"…Who gave you this?"

His voice was soft, almost reverent. Fingers gently traced the lines of the script, and Kurt's body seized in a violent shiver at the touch. Andrew glanced up at that.

"Blaine," he said emptily.

Again, watching him carefully, Andrew's fingers brushed over the script. It tugged harshly like an exposed nerve, and Kurt couldn't stop himself from jerking away. The touch was vulnerable, invasive.

"What a clever gift," Andrew said quietly, eyes suspiciously wet. His thumb lightly edged the outline of the thread as he went back to studying its contours. "Very clever. Who knew he had it in him." His hand hovered over Kurt's skin. Kurt felt paralyzed. What was going on?

"I'm sorry," Andrew told him, voice as deceptively light as his touch.

Kurt watched him carefully. "…For what?"

Something had changed in Andrew—where he was once all clear, hard lines, he had suddenly become angry, fragile, muddied watercolors. Kurt braced himself.

"I was going to let you go tonight," he told Kurt. "I was going to make you forget everything. You were going to lose it all after finally knowing it again, and then I was going to let you go. You would have died in your bed at the end of next week from withdrawal—sudden, unexpected. I thought that would be poetic. But…" A brief, fake smile twitched at Andrew's lips, and his fingers curl over the lettering, just barely touching it. Kurt tensed, skin tender. "This changes everything. Blaine has plans for you, and I can't let that continue. You see…" Andrew met Kurt's eyes, and it was like looking at a rabid, injured animal. "I'm only here to teach him a lesson. It's a lesson he has to learn, Kurt. If I let you go now, he's going to think he can still save you, and he can't. He'll never be able to save you."

Andrew was venomous, now, and he knifed the heel of his palm into Kurt's chest. Kurt's whole body gave a jolt as electricity stung through his veins, igniting him as Andrew ground his palm into the threads of words exposed to him—as if he could somehow rub them out if only he pressed hard enough.

"Because he killed you the minute he set eyes on you. And he needs to realize that."

It was like someone was peeling and stripping off his skin, and Kurt could barely pay attention as Andrew adjusted his grip and took something out of his pocket_._ Withdrawal, Andrew's painful grip, he felt too stretched over—

"Are you watching this, Blaine?" Andrew called out, and for the first time his face was deadly serious. Kurt was paralyzed as the muffled voice screamed too far away inside his head: _NO NO NO NO NO NO—_"You don't have a choice anymore. You don't have a plan. This is what happens when you pretend you can fool us…"

Andrew pierced through him like a lance: "People get hurt."

_Pain_.

Shock.

Kurt's mouth parted as he forgot to breathe. No: he _couldn't_ breathe. He couldn't keep himself upright. Something foreign was sticking out of him. He looked down.

A knife.

It had been a knife.

"What…?" he mouthed.

He was shaking, he was—falling, he—couldn't take a breath, it hurt to take a breath, shouldn't it be hurting more he had a knife inside of his stomach—

In front of his eyes, the world shifted, and he was in the choir room, looking up as Erickson plunged the same knife into Blaine. _'Heal yourself.'_ Horror slicked his throat, or was that the herb he had swallowed? Andrew's voice floated over him, sounding weirdly dazed: "Do you see what he turns us into? What he makes us do?"

The ground was wet—with snow? Blood? He was wet with it. Light-headed. A hand ran through his hair.

"You and me, Kurt, we're the same. Fascinators. But Blaine… you don't understand what he can do. Erickson's right: he's a parasite. He twists our minds. Gets into our heads. He's in your head right now, isn't he? Aren't you, Blaine?"

Erickson plunged the knife in. _'Heal yourself.'_

"Don't worry. He won't be able to make us do _anything_ after we're through with him."

No. Kurt's lips formed the word, but no sound came out. No_._

"You can die happy in the knowledge of that. In a way, I've set you free, too."

_No,_ Kurt tried to cry, but instead something ragged and thick coughed up his throat. His body twitched uncontrollably on the ground. Wet ground. There was too much blood. Footsteps faded away and light went with them. _Scream. Get help. Scream. _But he couldn't. Over and over in front of him, the image of Blaine being stabbed presented itself. _Heal yourself._ Sharp. It hurt. Where was Mercedes? Rachel? Sebastian? (Who was Sebastian?) _Heal yourself._ White, choked off, pale. _Heal yourself._ Help. Help. Blaine, help, please, help.

Muffled voices were screaming his name. Inside his head. _Heal yourself. _Wake up, oh my god, what happened, someone call 911, stop the bleeding, what happened, and he couldn't answer them. He couldn't open his eyes.

_KURT!_

_HEAL YOURSELF!_

Was it still wet? Maybe it was just the snow.

It was too cold.

…

_Who was Sebastian…?_


	11. There Are Two Ways Out Of This Building

_**Title: **__Keeping the Balance_ (9a/11?)**  
>Author: <strong>sun_and_rain**  
>Rating: <strong>PG-13**  
>Warning: <strong>deals with issues of consent, homophobia, and memory loss**  
>Summary: <strong>_No one recognized the name when Kurt first spoke it–a name he'd found buried somewhere in his dreams–but he couldn't shake the feeling that it was important: "Blaine". Whatever had been taken from them had something to do with Blaine._

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><p><strong>Chapter Summary:<strong> Someone takes a trip down memory lane.

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><p><strong>AN: **Yet another long chapter. It's like Christmas! Or... is that the wrong holiday? Anyway. Buckle your seatbelts, kids! Beyond this door lies answers. Many, many answers. And many more next chapter, too. Everything is getting explained in these next two, so if you still have questions after this chappie, leave a note or send me an ask on tumblr so I know what was clear and what wasn't! I hope people are still reading after the craziness of last chapter... don't hate me? Please? We're almost done! (Sort of.)

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><p><strong>Chapter Nine A: There Are Two Ways Out of This Building<strong>

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><p><em>"But Mama…"<em>

_"I'm sorry, but that's just how it's going to be from now on. Go back upstairs."_

_"Are you serious? I can't even come down to the kitchen? No one's around!"_

_"You don't know that."_

_"Mama, I can feel it!"_

_"It's only temporary. Go back upstairs."_

_"What are we hiding from, anyway?"_

_…_

_"I'll explain soon. I promise. Now will you go back upstairs, or will I have to go get your father?"_

_"I'm going, I'm going!"_

* * *

><p>He was himself. Part of himself. All of himself. Plus something else.<p>

Was someone else in here with him?

Something happened to the real world (he knew because he wasn't there at the moment), and the fake world _the dream world? was he dreaming?_ that he'd become so familiar with in the last month _(mental pow-wows, that was what Andrew called them)_ waved friendly to him. He usually met someone here. Someone _was_ here.

Oh, right, of course. Someone was here with him. Someone was always here. Who was the someone? Eye color? Hair color? Name? The answers had fallen out of his pockets and he couldn't seem to find where he'd dropped them. Maybe he should start by figuring out what was his and what was the someone else's.

The memories. Were those his? Or were they someone else's?

* * *

><p><em>"You look like your grandfather, you know," his Lola said one day, staring at him from the rocking chair. <em>

_Once upon a time, when she used to visit, she'd chase him around the house until he collapsed from giggling. Now though, she sat. His Mama opened the door, and Lola would come in moving like the turtle, and chasing him around the house seemed too large a feat to accomplish. Instead, she sat, and she spoke to him, her washed-worn wrinkles lined with tiredness (that was new), and her eyes sparkling with mischief (that was old)._

_He fidgeted with a curl of his hair, biting his lip. "Was he like me?"_

_His Lola nodded solemnly. "He was exactly like you," she told him. "You could be his copy."_

_Lola said it differently than Mama did. Mama told him 'you have your grandpa's eyes' like she told him stories about princesses in towers. Lola said it like she was telling him the moon was round and far away. It just was. _

_He tugged on another curl, tracing patterns with his feet. She, of all people would understand. Wouldn't she?_

_"Lola, I think I'm…" he began, quiet. "I think I might be different." He stuttered quickly through it._

_Lola looked at him carefully. "I think you are, too."_

_He chewed on his lip. "What does it mean?"_

_Thoughts chased away the twinkle in his grandmother's eye, and she thought for a very long time._

_ "It means you will have to be very brave," she finally said, "and very kind, and very clever. But I will tell you a secret," she leaned forward and he leaned in closer to hear: "You will always have your family. Even your grandfather will always be there for you."_

_"But…" He protested, confused. "But he's not here."_

_Lola looked at him, offended. "He is here. He is standing right in front of me."_

_He looked around wildly—still nothing. He looked back at Lola suspiciously. "I don't see him," he said._

_"Why would **you** see him?" Lola tutted. "He's standing in front of **me**."_

_"Lola!" He scolded, crossing his arms. "Don't be silly. I'm the only one standing in front of you!"_

_"I tell you I see him, totoy, that is what matters here." she said firmly. "Now come over here and give your Lola a hug."_

_He climbed up onto the rocking chair and placed his arms around her sturdy form. She held him close. Her lips kissed his forehead._

_"I will tell you another secret," she murmured into his skin. "You won't understand it now, but one day, you will: You must trust yourself. No matter what others may tell you—no matter what even your mama may say—don't be frightened of yourself. You are always you… no matter if it feels like you aren't. Remember that."_

_He frowned. What did **that** mean?_

_His Lola swatted at him._

_"Now that's enough of that. Go. Go play. You're frowning too much, you'll get wrinkles and lose all your hair."_

_"Not my hair!" he cried, grabbing his curls._

_"I think I already see some of it falling out."_

_"No you don't!" he scrambled off the rocking chair. "Do you? Mama!" he called, running to the kitchen as Lola laughed. "Mama, is my hair falling out, really?!"_

* * *

><p>It was an embrace, that's what it was. A big, giant, comfortable hug. That's why he was having trouble differentiating between himself and the someone else. No wonder.<p>

Well, at least he wasn't alone. And the hug felt nice. Images stitched themselves around him—he didn't recognize them, or remember any of them, so he was pretty sure they belonged to the someone else. In fact, he was pretty sure he knew the other's name. It danced around in his mind tentatively. He didn't speak it out loud.

He was also pretty sure that being stabbed and bleeding out onto the ground was the last thing he remembered happening in the real world.

He should probably be more alarmed about that.

* * *

><p><em>He sat on the couch, eyes closed, hands on knees. He felt it when Andrew entered the room.<em>

_"Oh, hey!" the other boy laughed. The couch dipped as Andrew sat down next to him. "Fancy meeting you here." Andrew bumped shoulders with him. The world spun a little._

_"I don't mean to be rude, but I'd really like to be alone," he said quietly. _

_Something like amusement flared up in Andrew. "Overwhelmed, are we?"_

_Andrew was his only friend in this place, the only one he felt at all close to (and that wasn't saying much). He didn't want to alienate him, but there was something distracting—involving—about being around him. He never listened; he just sort of did whatever he wanted. It was the opposite of anchoring, and he really needed an anchor right now._

_"Hey," Andrew shifted closer. "I might have a way to help you out. It's a little more effective than meditation. Or whatever it is you're doing."_

_Despite himself, his eyes opened. He turned, curious, to meet Andrew's. "How so?"_

_"Let me show you."_

_He caught the hunger just before Andrew's lips drove into his own, shocking embers to light in the pit of his stomach. "Oh—!" he gasped, pulling away. Andrew following him close, grabbing at his waist. "Oh—wait—!"_

_"Calm down, I've got you. Don't panic. Feel that?" Andrew kissed him and—and **did **something, **pulled** at something inside of him and—_

_"Whoa, whoa—" he pushed Andrew away. "Whoa. What was that?"_

_"Feel it? It's a stronger connection, right? Everyone else has to access the Magic in an artificial way, but us, we can get more personal. We can do more." Andrew grinned and did it again. And—it was painful, but it was also…_

_"Hold—hold on a second." Andrew didn't, pushing him into the couch. "Hey, just, just slow down, **wow**—" A presence inside of him he had never been truly aware of before swelled up, inside and around him, and he lost the feeling of the fabric beneath him. Andrew's fingers found handholds he didn't know his body had and clung tight. Oh. Was that—? **Oh**. A cry escaped him, Andrew's craving washing him in a sea of tingling. Oh, that was… oh, oh, he wasn't ready for this, he—he—he—_

_Fingers pressing buttons, hands in handholds. It wasn't that it didn't feel good, it just—it felt good, it felt good, but he—he was pretty sure he didn't want this. Right? He needed something, an anchor, something, he was too adrift in the sea. Where was the pause button?_

_"Look, it's—it's not that—**ah**—" _

_"Mmhmm?"_

_"Not that I'm—oh g—not—**attracted** to you, I—" There it was again, that **pulling** thing, and Andrew gripped him hard. Andrew, who **wanted** him so much he practically bled it out onto him like a wound. He gasped, tensing. "**Oh-god-would-you-please-stop-doing-that!**"_

_Andrew laughed, and he was seriously starting to reconsider the whole 'closest friend' thing. "Come **on**," Andrew grinned lazily. "It'll be incredible."_

_"I highly doubt that!" he protested, trying to push away. No, he definitely didn't want this. It was too much. Change the channel, stop the movie._

_"Have you ever tried it before?"_

_"No," he snapped, trying to get through Andrew's clogged ears to his brain. "And I—I don't **want **to. I don't even **know** you that well!"_

_"You're so tense," Andrew grabbed his wrists like they were roughhousing. "**Relax.**"_

_...Panic hit him before it was swallowed up in some… artificial, forced serenity. His muscles couldn't work. They melted into the couch. Into Andrew. And he… his vision filmed over in gold. Andrew shone through it like a beacon._

_ "…Y-…" Exhaustion. Calm? What was…? Too much work to talk. "…wh… what did you… just…?" Like he was drugged. _

_Andrew, stroking his hair. His eyes tried to close. "Shh," he caressed. "It's alright. I just want to try—"_

_"—Are you Blaine Anderson?"_

* * *

><p>He stumbled as he was thrown out of the memory. "<em>Blaine!<em>" he gasped out. That was the name! The eyes, the hair—he remembered! And he was Kurt. He had just been stabbed, and Blaine… where was Blaine? He felt him, all around, the air cradled him in Blaine's presence but Blaine himself wasn't anywhere to be seen.

What was happening?

_Heal yourself,_ he remembered someone screaming to him.

He had milliseconds to think about it before he was thrown into another memory.

* * *

><p><em>"She's in the bathroom!" he was screaming. "Please, help her, help her, please, oh my god—!"<em>

_"Blaine, you're hysterical-!"_

_"She's dying! She's dying!"_

* * *

><p>Tears streamed his face, his mind a whirl of confusion as he spun out of the scene. "Why are you showing me this?" Kurt panted, dizzy. "Blaine, talk to me! Where are you? What are you doing?"<p>

He stumbled and fell—

* * *

><p><em>He was beautiful… the most beautiful boy he had ever seen. Sea-foam eyes, and porcelain features staring back at him. He couldn't stop staring. They locked eyes and—he just froze. And sank, deep deep down, too frozen to swim. Something else, that other <strong>him<strong> lying in wait deep inside of him, took the reins, rose up and overtook him. It was instinct. It was terrifying. Was this boy the one he'd been dreaming about? He was so **loud**._

_Then another boy interrupted like a herd of elephants, and Blaine broke through the surface of the water again to breathe._

_Holy shit. _

_He cloaked his fear in politic and smiles, hid inside the charm of the cute boy helping him up._

_That had never happened before. That creature inside him, that had never taken over him before. What had Erickson done to him?_

_Holy shit. Holy shit. Deep breaths. Erickson was a distant memory. Erickson was gone._

_This boy, though… this boy was—just adorable. _

_This was going to be interesting._

* * *

><p>Kurt shook his head as he came back. "What are you trying to show me? I don't get it."<p>

He felt himself being eased into the next one. Slowly, carefully.

Around him was a room, all polished wood and hearty fire. It focused, sharp, in high definition.

Somehow, he got the feeling this was the memory Blaine had meant to show him all along.

* * *

><p><em>He could feel it when he entered the room.<em>

It wasn't an emotion, exactly. It was a feeling; an aura, slipping past his mental walls and shivering up his spine, running fast fingers down his arms. _It_. Tensing, he stepped back.

"Andrew!" He whispered harshly, spinning around to catch him before he left—but the door clicked shut as he reached out. The sound was loud in the silence. _No, don't leave me here!_

He felt _it_ crawl like spiders underneath his skin.

Warmth at his back. Someone was right behind him. He spun, fast, his hand springing up in front of his face defensively. It didn't even rise past his chest when a voice called out: "Put your hand down."

He fought himself, tensing against his own strength. His hand—slowly—dropped back to his side.

Blaine watched the man behind the ornate oak desk warily.

"Do you know who I am?" the man asked.

Blaine glanced back at the door helplessly, but his walls were up: he couldn't feel Andrew at all. Even so, he knew Andrew wasn't coming back any time soon. _"Wes wants you to go along with it,"_ David's voice whispered in his ear. _Wes_, he thought frantically, _what the hell did you get me into?_

"You're the new Head," he answered carefully. "Head Erickson."

Erickson's face was an unreadable slate. "No," he said softly. "Don't play games with me, Blaine. I've seen you in that library you love so much. Pouring over your books." Blaine fought the urge to step back as Erickson leaned forward, eyes intent on Blaine's own. "Do you know who I am?" he repeated firmly.

The air whispered the answer in his ears. Blaine tried to swallow down the whimper that threatened to escape him. (_It_ prickled against the hairs at the back of his neck.)

"No," he lied.

"No?" Erickson stood up, movements deliberate and slow, and walked around the desk. It was all Blaine could do not to collapse as he made his way towards him. "Why so scared, Magic-son? What do you feel when you look at me?" He reached out a hand and—

"Stay away," Blaine hissed, jerking backward, turning to get away from the door. "Don't come near me."

"You don't have any power over me. The commands work the other way around."

"Don't come near me!" he cried, hands coming up to act as feeble shields as he backed away. Something had snapped within him, and every atom of his body was screaming in alert. Why had he agreed to this? _Wes!_ Had he known? Had he sent Blaine in here on purpose, sent him to this—_monster_? Blaine had heard stories of the new Head from the Warblers, had felt the evidence of Erickson's dislike of him in the way he had been systematically restricted from every room in the Academy except his own. But he had never been in the same room as him before—had never _felt_ him before. He would have never agreed to this if he had known. The deal was off. How could Wes have asked him to do this?

"Why are you here? What do you want?" he demanded.

"You, of course," Erickson answered smoothly. He followed after Blaine in leisurely steps. Panic swelled Blaine's ribs, making it hard to breathe.

"Did they call you here? The Academy? You're not needed here." Fear drove syllables out of his mouth, sharp, fearful, fast. "Andrew's going to kill me, he's already going to kill me, you're not needed here."

"Nonsense. Andrew isn't going to kill you."

"He's my Fascinator," Blaine protested weakly.

Erickson was suddenly too close. Blaine didn't even have time to shout as his hands were knocked away and terrible, cold fingers gripped his chin, forcing his face upward.

"Stop hiding from me," Erickson commanded. It jolted through him like electricity. "I don't talk to shells."

"What—?" Blaine began, eyes wide with confusion—when suddenly Erickson's other palm was pressing against his stomach, and he—twisted, and—something _reached_ into him, a claw, an invader, puncturing deep inside of him and _dragging_ what it caught back up to the surface—not calling on Magic, not using it, just—_rearranging _his organs and changing, twisting, _forcing_ him, it was unnatural, painful, _painful—!_ He cried out, _loudly_, as his vision filmed with gold and something feral took the place of his lungs.

And then Erickson's palm was gone.

Blaine felt like he had been torn up and patchworked back together without all the pieces in the right places. Hyper-sensitive. Over-present.

Erickson stepped away and Blaine stumbled, a hand coming out to steady himself against the nearest surface. His fingers dug into the cushion of the chair as all the color in the room suddenly brightened unbearably. Unease crept its tendrils over his mind. (When had they backed against the desk?)

"What did you do?" he asked faintly as the world shifted. Erickson's presence, so terrifying, pressed against his now-tingling skin.

Erickson didn't bother answering him. "Finally," he said. "It's nice to meet you."

Blaine glanced up at him and another person's fury rose up inside him. He swayed, blinking hard. He felt off-balance. "That wasn't necessary." He gripped the chair. Someone else was using his voice. "I'm not a _shell_, or whatever you called me," Blaine said in his own words.

Erickson turned dismissively, heading back behind his desk. The voice inside of Blaine persisted. "Why did Andrew bring me to you? What do you want to do with me?"

"What do you _think_ I want to do with you?" Erickson said, low and dangerous as he loomed over the desk. Every instinct in Blaine's body screamed at him to run. "You know who I am."

"_Evorsor_." The word alit in his mind from one if his books, and it hissed out of his mouth like the poisoned smoke it stood for. Contempt and a paralyzing fear spread out from the wildness now resting under his ribs. It brought with it an old memory that gripped his heart with stone fingers. Blaine shivered as that _feeling_ he had felt when he'd entered the room invaded his senses, seeming to swell around him in recognition of the word: cold, ice-cold, and filled with too many ghosts. His air escaped him and another name slipped out with it—a truer name that seemed to come from an ancient well somewhere within him, from some creature inside that could translate the curves of the letters carved in the ice around him much clearer than any book could: "Sluagh." _Soul-stealer._

Erickson granted him a shark's smile. "There you go. Your kind always loved to name things, didn't they?"

Blaine swayed from the force of the hatred coming from the feral thing inside him. There was too much time trapped in him. He felt distant… dizzy… Unease tingled up his spine.

"Now that we're not hiding, we can have an actual conversation. Sit down." Blaine felt his body plunge into the chair underneath his fingers. "We both know Andrew isn't _your_ Fascinator, don't we? Not yet, at least. You haven't chosen him."

Blaine shook his head, still tense and uncomfortable in the chair. "I have dreams—"

"And that's all they will be," Erickson interrupted. "Dreams. You won't die at Dalton, Magic-boy. Not while I'm here."

_Unnatural,_ something cried in his ears. Ghosts and death swum in the air around him, prickling his skin, worrying his forehead. Those words were wrong. Off. He _had_ to die—that wasn't right. Not dying—it was unnatural.

_You won't die at Dalton._

It was a threat. It felt like one.

He didn't know what to do. (_Evorsor._)

"There's a cycle…" he said quietly. "You can't… you can't break it."

"I assure you I can."

"Why? Why would you do that?" his voice was small. "Andrew would kill me anyway, why…?"

"And you'd lie dormant inside of him until he died, or created a child, and then you'd be able to reweave yourself a new body and a new life to continue your slow little takeover. No, that's not stopping you. Andrew will kill you, but you'll still live on. You're _Magic_, little parasite. You're trapped in immortality." A smile, small and terrible, stretched Erickson's mouth: "I'm going to set you free."

There was a moment of blankness—of white noise in his mind. Incomprehension. Stillness.

And then it registered.

Out. He needed to get out. He needed to leave the room, run away, run away, he needed _out_! He bolted up from the chair, electrified with fear, but Erickson saw it coming.

"**_Sit down_**_!_" he bellowed. It was like an invisible rope had tied itself around his waist and _pulled_ him back down. His bones _fell, collapsed, tugged_ him back into the seat. He jerked, twisted, but he was stuck.

"Stop," he cried helplessly.

"You called me Evorsor, didn't you? Let me tell you how I'll be your obliteration. I'll free you of your body," Erickson continued ruthlessly. Blaine lunged forward, struggling against invisible restraints. "And I'll force you open. You'll be more powerful than you've ever imagined you'd be. Then I'm going to make you find that little hideaway the rest of your kind have taken up residence in. You're going to bring me to it." Blaine's eyes widened, his breath quickening. Folk tales his mother had told him (and memories some part of him had always carried) conjured up images in his head of towns, whole cities of Magic-folk, hidden from the rest of the world in their own little pocket of space.

"They're impossible to find," he said faintly. "It would take years, _forever_, to find them."

"If you were constrained by space and time, yes. You'll have no such limitations when I'm done with you."

"Why would I help you enslave my own people?!" he cried.

"Because you won't have a choice, Blaine," Erickson explained patiently. "You won't have a body. You won't have a thought in that little head. You'll be blank. You'll be mine."

Absence of feeling, of the physical, of—_anything_ that made him who he was. Except the empathy. The empathy he wouldn't be able to feel, the empathy he would only be able to convert—into energy, Magic, endless possibilities. Nothing is impossible if you feel it strongly enough, and Blaine… he wouldn't even be able to _feel_. He would _be_ nothing.

"You want to turn me into a monster," he breathed.

"You _are_ a monster," Erickson snapped. "I'm going to turn you into a tool."

An empty vessel. A weapon_. No._ He had to get out of the chair.

"Besides, you won't be helping me enslave them. You're going to find them."

"No."

"You're going to kill them."

"No! No!"

"All of them."

"Stop, please, just stop—!"

"And when you're done slaughtering the rest of your parasite family, I'm going to let you back into your body"—_no, no, no, no—_" and you'll feel the repercussions of what you did. And then you'll perform one last magic trick."

He wrenched, pulled, he was glued—_get out of the chair—_

"You're going to make yourself disappear."

It sounded too much like commands—it _felt_ like commands, like truths of a future that he couldn't escape, and he fought like he had never fought before, straining against his own body. How could Wes trap him into this? How could Andrew bring him to this? How could the Academy let this happen? How could he _let_ himself be _trapped_ like this, he was trapped, he was trapped, he was _trapped!_ He had to get out of the chair, he had to get out of the room, he had to _get out! Get out of the chair! Get out!_

"The Academy won't let you do this," he cried. "No one will let you do this!"

"Who's going to know?" Erickson laughed. "_You_ can't tell anybody."

The command washed over him, prickling at his skin, and Blaine knew, he _knew_—he couldn't. He couldn't tell anyone. He couldn't get help. He couldn't _stop_ this, he couldn't warn anyone, he couldn't get out of the chair. No escape. He couldn't get out of the chair. He couldn't get out of the chair. He couldn't get out of the chair. He couldn't _get out of the chair, he couldn't get out of the chair, he COULDN'T GET OUT OF THE CHAIR HE COULDN'T GET OUT OF THE CHAIR HE COULDN'T _ _GET OUT OF THE CHAIR HE COULDN'T HE COULDN'T HE **COULDN'T**—!_

The scream ripped out of his throat, a wordless cry of rejection.

The room was small. The fire crackled. The sound was swallowed into the walls. Absorbed.

Like he hadn't screamed at all.

And he sat, wilted, trapped. Still.

In the chair.

_Soul-stealer_.

He sunk. He couldn't do anything. He might as well not feel anything at all for all the good feeling did him. He couldn't _do_ anything.

_He was trapped._

"Can't move, can you?" Erickson noted. Blaine couldn't stop shaking. "I have you. You've lost."

His breath hitched. Tears suddenly burned at his vision, and Blaine squeezed his eyes shut before any could satisfy the monster in front of him by escaping. _Trapped._

"I'm telling you this so you know what it's in store," Erickson informed him, voice dancing in triumph as he leaned back in his chair. "When you're awoken and brought up to the highest room in the mansion tomorrow morning, I want you to know what's coming. I want you to know what you agreed to when you told Andrew you'd let him experiment with you all those months ago. As you're wasting away in the cell we've made for you—as you're driven insane by the emotions we won't let you release—I want the last thought you hold to be the knowledge of what you are becoming. Think about it before you go to sleep tonight. You will single-handedly be the destruction of your entire race."

He couldn't move. He couldn't think. This man… how could a person be so filled with such a coldness? He wasn't a man. He couldn't be a man.

There was nothing left inside of him. He had screamed it all away.

"Andrew won't be back for you," Erickson said off-handedly. "You can leave, now."

Blaine was in a daze as his muscles obeyed the order. He walked as one dead to the door. Erickson's hawk eyes watched him the whole time.

"Blaine," Erickson called. Blaine turned to meet his eyes.

"Sweet dreams."

It was like a punch to the gut. Fury flared, and Blaine slammed the door shut on his way out.

His eyes squeezed shut. The sound of the heavy wood on brick awoke something deep within him.

_You can leave, now_, he had said. That had been his command.

A glimmer of hope, a flicker of resolve lit a fire in his blood.

_You can leave, now._

A plan half-formed in his mind. Not even a plan, just—just an option. It was crazy. But he was clever. He was so much cleverer than Erickson thought he was. His body might not be his anymore, his choices few, but he still had his mind. He was trapped—but he still had options. He always had options.

(It wouldn't be running away if he had been commanded to do it, would it?)

He couldn't slip out the door; they were watching for him. His mental walls would prevent him from being able to sense and anticipate any guards, and if he was caught, it would only be one word from someone with Talent and he'd be imprisoned again. Wes wouldn't help him, not when he couldn't tell him _why_ he needed to escape. He'd demand answers Blaine couldn't give. So he couldn't take an underground tunnel.

But he still had options.

_You can leave, now._

No one would be watching a fourth story window. He still had enough power in him to rip open a doorway without a Magician's help. If he could find an empty corridor, smash open the window, rip open a doorway as he fell… he could leave. He could leave, and they'd never know where he went. He could find that pocket of space where the other Magic folk were, hide with them until Erickson was long dead and buried. He could find his family, his parents, and hide their house from the rest of the world. He could fall and land somewhere no one else knew and just let himself die.

It would hurt. Falling four stories was bound to.

But he could escape.

Damn Wes. Damn Andrew, damn Erickson, damn the Academy. Damn all of their students. He could leave.

_You can leave, now._

Yes. Yes.

He still had fucking options.

* * *

><p>…<p>

…

Kurt opened his eyes, bright sunlight forcing him to squint. He sat up, wincing as a dull pain in his side hindered the movement. He glanced down at the patched up mess that was the makeshift bandage on his side. Goodbye dream world, hello Lima, Ohio.

Or—no. This wasn't Lima, Ohio.

He glanced around the bedroom, memories that weren't his own alighting foreign recognition in his brain. _Westerville._

He felt someone else in his mind: waiting, expectant, exhausted. Images flashed. _You can leave, now_.

"Don't worry," Kurt told him darkly, a heavy resolve coloring his voice. He got up carefully, making his way to the door.

"I'll take it from here."


	12. First Interlude: But Wait, There's More!

**_Title: _**_Keeping the Balance_ (Interlude)  
><strong>Author: <strong>sun_and_rain  
><strong>Rating: <strong>PG-13  
><strong>Warning: <strong>deals with issues of consent, homophobia, and memory loss  
><strong>Summary: <strong>_No one recognized the name when Kurt first spoke it–a name he'd found buried somewhere in his dreams–but he couldn't shake the feeling that it was important: "Blaine". Whatever had been taken from them had something to do with Blaine._

* * *

><p><strong>Chapter Summary:<strong> One last memory.

* * *

><p><strong>AN: **Yep. I'm still alive. I'm just absolutely terrible at juggling life-outside-college with fandom. I promise I will finish this fic! And probably very soon. In the meantime, here's a little something to tide you over.

* * *

><p><strong>First Interlude: But Wait, There's More!<br>**

* * *

><p><em>"Just tell us what's wrong. We can help!"<em>

_Of course David had found him._

_The words shoved and pressed against his lips valiantly, but Erickson's Command rendered him artificially silent. As if the Warblers knew what they had gotten into—what they'd gotten __**him**__ into—anyway. He shook his head. "No."_

_"You're being childish."_

_"I said no, David," he snapped. "And you can tell Wes to stop making you ask."_

_"Running away doesn't solve anything, Blaine."_

_Of course it didn't, not for Dalton. But for __**Blaine**__... _

**_They'll find you. They'll always find you._**_ That primal voice that had awoken inside the Evorsor's office clawed its way around his ribs. He shivered. _

_"Please. We're just worried."_

_Blaine rolled his eyes, testing the next window. __**Also locked**__. "Then alert the faculty. I'm sure they'll stop me."_

_"Blaine—"_

_"I can't," he said suddenly. __**I can't tell you. I can't do this. I can't be here anymore. **__He leaned heavily against the third window (also locked), a desperate, screaming denial filling his veins. "I…" Words wouldn't come. They choked on their way up his esophagus and he knew he'd said he'd spy on Erickson for them, and he knew Wes thought they could protect him, but they __**couldn't.**__ They didn't understand what Erickson was capable of. They didn't understand what __**Blaine**__ was capable of. _

_" I'm sorry, I just… I __**can't**__."_

_David stared at him hard. "If you do this, you put all of us in danger."_

_Blaine knew._

**_If I stay_**_, he wanted so desperately to say, __**I put a whole race in danger.**_

_David had a determined glint in his eye that Blaine recognized._

_"Blaine," he started—and Blaine sucked in a breath._

_"Don't. Please. Please."_

_"Blaine." No, not his one way out, __**no, not his one way out—**_

_"David, don't—!"_

_"__**Stay**__."_

_He couldn't leave. _

_He could kill him. He could rip him apart, he could shatter the window, he could __**scream**__. He breathed, fast and huge, battling hyperventilation with a desperate, forced calm._

_"That's not fair," he tried to reason. "You know that's not fair."_

_David was steel. "If it's the only way to keep you here, then I think it's the fairest thing in the world."_

_"Wes told you to, didn't he?" It burst out of his mouth. "That's why he sent you this time, instead of coming to talk to me himself." He pressed his head to his hands, and hyperventilation won out. "Plotting bastard."_

_"He's worried about you—"_

_"If he were so worried, he would be helping me leave!" Blaine snapped, nerves exposed wires._

_"You don't know what's out there, Blaine."_

_"But I know what's in here! I—Maybe __**you**__ could, maybe you, or Wes, or Jeff, or—god, maybe __**Jeremiah**__ could, I don't know! But I—" He wasn't making sense, he knew he wasn't making sense, the words caught in Command and stoppered inside his throat for eternity. __**You can't tell anyone. **__David, so smart, and Wes, so strategic, maybe they could help him figure out how to turn Erikson's horrible plan on its head if only he could speak to them, could tell them, but he __**couldn't.**_

_ "You're being selfish."_

_He fought his own tongue. __**No words. **__"I can't—do it—David. I can't. "_

_He didn't know. David just thought he was afraid of Erickson, but that wasn't it. He was __**trapped**__. _

_"__**I can't**__." _

_Erickson was going to destroy him._

_Something of the words he had trapped inside of him must have shown in his eyes, because David suddenly stepped away from him. Betrayal and disappointment upset his usually-comforting brown eyes._

_ "Don't stay, then," he said lowly. "__**Go**__."_

_And, suddenly, there was air. Blaine wanted to collapse with relief._

_"…Thank you," he breathed._

_"I'm not doing it for you," David suddenly scowled. Blaine swallowed. "I'm doing it for us."_

_For a brief moment, Blaine felt a pang of guilt. Escaping put all of the Warblers in danger. They'd be the first suspects in aiding his escape: the commons were locked, and he couldn't have gotten in without help. Everyone knew David and Wes were his friends._

_But he had to do this. It was his only option._

_He checked another window: bingo. Unlocked. Blaine pushed it open, and looked down._

_"Just don't come back," David suddenly said, that well-worn concern beginning to color his voice again. "If you leave and they find you trying to come back…" He didn't need to finish the sentence. Blaine knew what Dalton would do to him if they found him again. "Just… Just don't come back."_

_ Swallowing thickly, he looked back at David. This was probably the last time they would ever see each other._

_Impulsively, he grabbed the other boy and hugged him tightly, pouring as much comfort and appreciation as he could out of his hands and into David._

_ "I never planned to," he said honestly._

_Then, he let go. Went up to the window. _

_And fell._

_It felt like flying. It felt like __**freedom**__. He reveled in it, before instinct moved his fingers to search for the edges of reality and space. _

_Then two things happened at once._

_The first: Space ripped through his fingers as he called on all of his strength to open a doorway. He spun through it, the light of the portal blinding him._

_The second: a foreign voice suddenly __**ripped**__ through every wall of his mind, shattering his defenses like so much glass._

**_Help me!_**_ Someone, both of them, said/thought/shouted. _

_And then he hit the ground._


End file.
